Slacker is an ambitious new music service created by some industry veterans that takes aim at the iPod.
Slacker is a music player device, but it is also a music delivery service. It is path-breaking because it wants to let you take it anywhere: It will be the first service to use satellite to deliver music constantly to your device.
Slacker’s service is essentially a personalized Internet radio station, similar to popular services Last.fm and Pandora.
On Slacker, your “station” refreshes automatically with new music. It plays music that matches your tastes, which you determine by clicking “love it” on a song you like, and “ban it” for one you don’t like. Slacker then constantly updates the music it plays for you, finds new songs that match the bands you like, and songs from bands that are similar in style to those bands (those that have say, a similar energy level, popularity, or era; Slacker does not, however, assess “acoustic characteristics,” like Pandora does, to decide what music to send you). It reshuffles songs just like a radio station, but it feeds you newly released songs, and also other songs that match your updated tastes.
Slacker has licensed two million songs, so it has depth.
Slacker is so named because it is designed for the estimated 70 percent of people who like music, but who can’t be bothered to constantly update their playlists.
It is different from Last.fm and Pandora in other ways. You can go mobile with those services, but can play them on your device only if you’re within WiFi coverage.
The Slacker device, by contrast, is designed to be used anywhere. The device is about the size of a blackberry. So you can carry it around like you do an iPod. However, Slacker’s servers will communicate with your Slacker device constantly. It uses commercial satellites, and WiFi, refreshing your device’s drive with new songs when they are available. The communication happens every 15 seconds. If a new song found by Slacker matches your preferences, your device caches it. Then, if you do enter a place where satellites and WiFi can not reach the device, you can still listen to music from the cache. Slacker has a car dock.
This is an impressive team. Dennis Mudd, chief executive, was CEO at Musicmatch, a company he took to $70 million in revenue, and which he sold to Yahoo for $165 million. He has brought in Jim Cady as President (ex-CEO at Rio), and Jonathan Sasse as VP Marketing (ex-CEO iriver America).
The basic Slacker account will be free. A premium service of $7.50 a month lets you save tracks, and avoid ads. The hardware devices, depending on the model, will cost $149, $299 and $399. They’ll ship during the second half of the year. Slacker wants to integrate its music service within other devices, too, such as cellphones. You’ll be able to download up to 2,000 songs on the low-end device. Downloads will be $1 a track.
You can track your account on a Web player too (see image, at bottom).
The Web site will open tomorrow (Wednesday).
Based in San Diego, Slacker has raised $13.5 million in venture capital from Sevin Rosen, Austin Ventures and Mission Ventures.
Seperately, Marshall Kirpatrick points to news emerging from the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Tex.: Last.fm is developing a music video recommendation service based on the company’s Audio Scrobbler technology. More details here.
17 Comments
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David Scott Lewis said:
They should buy Pandora and use their recommendation engine.
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Michael Mahemoff said:
Podcatcher? It would be a shame not to.
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Martin Belam said:
So basically it is the same as the Vodafone RadioDJ 3G streaming personalised radio stations, except that I have to carry an extra device around with me as well as my phone?
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Pranav said:
Ever since I lost my ipod, I’ve been listening to last.fm on the PC - which is really cool, but I have nothing to listen to while away from the PC - slacker seems to solve this. really cool new gadget.
I don’t think this will “replace” the ipod or something like that.
It’s more of a 2.0 of satellite radio. So of you like listening to radio, you’ll use slacker, and for the times you don’t want to listen to the radio - you still have an ipod. Besides, from what I read here, this won’t allow you to “own” music, you will still be restricted to listen to what is being streamed, albeit, as per your tastes.
IMO, even if this device makes it, it may not quite affect ipod sales.
Here’s an Idea for the slacker people - let users “Buy” songs and store them right at your servers, let users select which songs they want to hear to, and stream them via the satellites - now THAT would be a total iPod killer.
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zuneone said:
Sounds like a good idea. I am definately a slacker and am not interested actually owning music.
I would be very content to be fed a stream of music I like without having to bother managing it.
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Brian Dear said:
How is Slacker supposed to survive with the new royalty rates for web streaming radio, recently announced by that copyright board? Seems like they’re going to need to have ads all over the place just to break even.
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mrshl said:
brian: slacker has probably negotiated with rights holders separately, which the law allows you to do. pandora can do the same. i don’t think pandora’s going anywhere.
it’s the small webcasters and hobbyists that are going to get killed by the new royalty rates. and i think that’s the point. it sucks, but i don’t think it’s going to cripple the larger services. because musicians and their labels can see the obvious benefit to being streamed on services like last.fm, pandora, and now slacker.
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Harshal Vaidya said:
Will Slacker work in India?
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Matt Marshall said:
That’s right. Slacker told me that they have negotiated rights, which means they won’t be affected by the royalty problem that Pandora is facing.
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Matt Marshall said:
Harshal, yes, they plan world-wide distribution. Don’t know what their timing is, but that’s definitely something they want to do.
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Steve Shaw said:
As Martin points out, this is something that is going to be in mobile phones.
New ultra-wide band codecs which are coming to phones will dramatically increase the fidelity of streaming audio to a mobile.
Imagine you make a “call” to (800) PAN-DORA to get your music. EDGE or GPRS can provide the simple data updates required for display. And if you get another call, you simply put PAN-DORA on hold and take the other line.
It’s a slam dunk.
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Ashley said:
Sounds easy and cool. I’ll get one!
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Adam said:
Good concept, but awful execution. The design of the portable device is overly complicated and will scare away a mass audience. This looks like a niche product thats going nowhere, despite the hype. Anyone still talking about the zune?
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Ernie said:
I don’t expect this to be an iPod killer, or even a Zune killer. But i really think the Slacker portable is really just touching upon a different segment of the market. I have been using the slacker web player since it’s release in March and have to say if the hardware is upto par with the software then they will have a great combo. Also noted that if they can get the third party support then i think they will have a good following. Slacker also stated that it would not be affected by the recent internet radio royalty price hikes (for now). A couple more weeks, and we’ll let the reviews come rolling in. Also check out http://www.slackersocial.com Seems to be a good start to a social backing. I’ll try to post an unboxing and complete review as soon as it arrives.
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Neville said:
I dislike anything to do with Ipods, and Slacker is pretty decent, though I prefer Lastfm and MeeMix..
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Sid said:
Delayed again on 2/2/08 (see below)
Do you really think it would be all that hard for Apple to augment an iPhone or iPod touch (which already have WiFi) to include a radio type service? I doubt Apple will be caught by the Slacker, Zune, (Still)Last.fm, etc. The bottom line is they are great products even if you don’t use iTunes…my 72 year old father loves his iPod and even that interface took him some time to learn.
_______SNIP_________
Thanks again for your purchase of a Slacker Portable. We have begun to ship Slacker Portables based on the order they were purchased. We are working to ship them as fast as possible, but due to the number of pre-orders it may take up to 10 business days to receive your unit.We know everyone is excited to get their Slacker Portable and we apologize for the delay in shipping. We are doing everything possible to ship all of the pre-ordered players as fast as possible. Therefore we are providing expedited shipping to all orders received on or before January 31st free of charge. You will be notified by email once your order has been shipped.
If you have any questions, please contact Slacker Support at support@slacker.com or call 858-943-5000 extension 3 between 8am-5pm (Pacific Time) Monday through Friday.
Sincerely,
Slacker Support
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iPod Music Downloads said:
But the slacker looks huge. iPod still looks “cooler”, so are its music downloads.
One Trackback
11:04 am
Music player Slacker signs deal with industry’s big four » VentureBeat said:
[...] need to be a big tech player to strike deals the major music companies. When Slacker was announced a year ago, it got positive press for being the first portable player that uses a satellite to deliver music [...]