Slacker.com
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Welcome to Slacker.com a website hoping to take on Apple and the iPod and actually make a dent in the market. The concept fairly simple, you stream internet radio thru your computer and customize it to your personal taste. You can log on for free and browse the different genres and you get 6 skips on the songs being played. you can ban songs you don't like preventing them from being played again. You can also create stations based on bands and genres of music. The handheld coming out this summer would stream the music and allow you to download songs via WiFi. There will be a pay version which will remove advertisements and give you unlimited skipping which would be very cool.
The former CEO of Musicmatch is one of the founders of Slacker so if you were familiar with their radio portion this is pretty much the same. This concept is already in motion via a website called Last.FM which builds playlists and streams music for your enjoyment. Communities are also built thru Last.FM and you can share your playlists. Slacker will take the concept one step further and give you the ability to take your music with you.
The player would allow you to stream music provided you were in range of WiFi and rely on music you had saved to the device when you were out of range. I don't know if you can purchase music thru the device and if so what kind of DRM is attached. I used to use the radio function of Musicmatch back in the day before they killed all the cool features and made you pay for them. This is the same thing except its now portable. Its like having a satellite radio with the ability to personalize your radio stations. You are still renting music since you would not be keeping the files (you may be able to but would have to pay for them). Napster did this with their service but the whole WiFi player and customization is new and more in depth.
Am I onboard, nah I have enough music but I like the idea. With the iTunes library I could see this really catching on. I think Slacker has a decent thing here but I don't think they can break anyone loose from Apple. You can walk around your house skipping tracks and pulling new ones but if satellites are not involved and its only Wifi getting the updates, its pretty much useless. More and more cities would need blanket WiFi for this to really work.
Posted by mardenhill 5/10/2007 04:29:00 PM
Labels: Music, Technology
