It’s no secret that Mari and I are both huge Slacker fans. In fact, we’ll go ahead and proclaim Slacker as the official music service of Zatz Not Funny. I subscribe to their Internet Radio Plus service ($48/yr), which enables unlimited skips and kills all advertising. AND caching of stations for offline iPhone playback… to arrive sometime in the near future. Mari subscribes to a higher tier of Premium service, which Slacker no longer advertises. Given their upcoming On-Demand offering, being demo-ed at CTIA, I think we now know why.
Slacker’s Premium tier allowed you to save/bookmark songs for playback on-demand. But it looks like Slacker will be taking this to a Rhapsody-eque level, with content searching, playlist creation, and on-demand playback. Pricing and timing haven’t been revealed, but they’ll have to come in lower than the competition… who’s yet to prove there’s a large (enough) market for this type of offering. Fortunately, Slacker On-Demand will be built on top of the existing Slacker service and application. Allowing folks to opt in or out at any time.
This sounds awesome. I’m a premium subscriber and I love their service. It’ll be interesting to hear how much it’ll be. If it’s the same as their premium service, I’d sign up.
Due to the licensing fees, I imagine they’d have to go higher. The question is, how much higher? Rhapsody is about $15 for this sort of service and others like Yahoo shut down. Hm. I can’t imagine it being less than $9.99/mo.
I think Slacker can make on-demand radio work where Rhapsody couldn’t. I am amazed at how much I use Slacker on a daily basis on multiple different devices.
One feature I still want- an easy way to exchange playlists with other users
Yep, brought to you by the same guy who brought you MusicMatch On Demand about a decade ago… can’t wait to see it.
Via MobileCrunch: Slacker also has their new Windows Mobile client on display at CTIA last night. The HD2 is super nice hardware, but most who follow this space will wait for Windows Phone 7 or will replace the OS with Android. Bad timing?
They also showed an iPhone with station caching. Won’t be long now…!
Shouldn’t Slacker just stick with its current setup: providing genre-based stations. The offer pre-defined or roll-your-own options.
If I want to play specific songs at my pleasure, I just buy them.
But honestly, I like the ‘randomness’ of the slacker stations. They’re very good at selecting, and I hear plenty of songs I prefer, like and expect via their stations.