20 years ago, you discovered music on the FM dial. End of story. Now there’s an uncharted frontier of outlaw torrents, renegade bloggers, on-demand gold miners, and fur-trapping radios. The zeitgeist has splintered, and there’s no piecing it back together. And I think we’re doing just fine without the robber barons of old. → Read More
You could discover a song on Pandora, search for more by the artist on Spotify, and get context from satellite radio DJs, or do it all in one place with Slacker. After hitting 4 million monthly users and 500,000 paid subscribers, Slacker today unveils a big redesign for its site, apps, and car integrations. It wants to claw mainstream users away from competitors with a “complete music service”. → Read More
I just read that Spotify is coming to the U.S! Oh, wait. That was an article from 2009. I hope they really mean it this time. I love the product. To grease the skids for them a bit, I’ve put together a little travel guide for what they can expect in advertising and media circles when they do arrive.
Lots of love in digital circles.
Being Swedish I’m guessing they’re fantastic dressers and… → Read More
Slacker, the ‘personal radio’ company, has raised $3 million in debt funding, an SEC filing reveals. The company confirmed that it has secured extra capital, from all of its existing investors, but wouldn’t say much else.
Asked what the financing round would be used for, the answer I got was: “for scaling the business”. → Read More
While I don’t want to suggest that you people are lazy (you are), I do want to offer you slackers two one year subscriptions to Slacker Radio Plus and three three-month subscriptions. With these subscriptions you get: Slacker Radio Plus: *Unlimited Skips *Unlimited Song Requests *No Audio or Banner Ads *Complete Lyrics *Station caching on BlackBerry, Android and coming soon to iPhone *Over 2… → Read More
An enraged reader, Josh Vickers, writes in today to complain about Slacker’s premium online radio service. Like Pandora, Slacker streams music to users for free. And like Pandora, Slacker limits the number of times you can skip songs each hour, and has advertising.
Both services allow users to remove those limitations if they pay a yearly fee. Slacker charges $48/year. Pandora charges $36/year… → Read More
Last week Verzion pushed Slacker Radio onto the BlackBerry Storm. This time around, the BlackBerry Tour is getting the same treatment. Why you ask? Well, Slacker Radio has put a little icon within the app that links available songs to the VZW V-Cast music store. So when a tune plays through Slacker Radio, customers will be able to purchase the song right there. → Read More
Last week Verzion pushed Slacker Radio onto the BlackBerry Storm. This time around, the BlackBerry Tour is getting the same treatment. Why you ask? Well, Slacker Radio has put a little icon within the app that links available songs to the VZW V-Cast music store. So when a tune plays through Slacker Radio, customers will be able to purchase the song right there. If for some reason Slacker… → Read More
Quick note for all you BlackBerry Storm users out there: Starting today Verizon is pushing Slacker Radio out to all the Storms network wide. Why? Well, Verzion worked out a deal with Slacker to integrate V Cast into the app. So when a song is playing on Slacker, there will be a button which will allow you to purchase the song via V CAST Music with Rhapsody catalog. Neat, I guess. → Read More
Quick note for all you BlackBerry Storm users out there: Starting today Verizon is pushing Slacker Radio out to all the Storms network wide. Why? Well, Verzion worked out a deal with Slacker to integrate V Cast into the app. So when a song is playing on Slacker, there will be a button which will allow you to purchase the song via V CAST Music with Rhapsody catalog. Neat, I guess. → Read More
Surprise! It looks like Sony’s soon-to-be-released X-series Walkmans feature a built-in Slacker Radio application that allows users to fill the device up with music from the streaming radio service when it’s within range of a Wi-Fi connection. → Read More
In order to make way for the new Slacker portable players, it looks as though the first-generation units will continue to be priced to move. You can grab an 8GB Slacker WiFi Internet Radio Player for $69.99 plus $5 shipping over on sellout.woot.com, today only. → Read More
Here’s a pretty great deal on a 2GB Slacker Portable player. It generally costs about $75 to $100 elsewhere but you can pick one up for just $54.99 at Geeks.com. → Read More
Sony’s $300 Internet Video Link add-on box for BRAVIA-series TVs has recently added the Slacker streaming music service to the list of available channels. Also added was content from Howcast.com, a site that contains a series of user-generated how-to videos. Slacker ought to lend some good music features to Sony’s service and Howcast has won some awards from TIME and PC Magazine, so both seem… → Read More
Today, Slacker announced the G2 personal radio player, which is 10x better than the first gen device. The 4GB model handles 25 stations while the 8GB model stores up to 40 are available for $200 and $250, respectively. The Wi-Fi has also been beefed up and battery life is up around 15 hours. The G2 is 40 percent smaller than the first gen model and you can side load your own music to the device… → Read More
Today RIM announced the Slacker application available for BlackBerry. It was demoed at CTIA and I got a chance to play around with it a little bit. The relationship brings Slacker Personal Radio to BlackBerry devices. The biggest benefit is the ability to cache thousands of songs. Every time you hit a hotspot the device will sync and update the station. Plenty of music is available from Fergie to… → Read More
Today RIM announced the Slacker application available for BlackBerry. It was demoed at CTIA and I got a chance to play around with it a little bit. The relationship brings Slacker Personal Radio to BlackBerry devices. The biggest benefit is the ability to cache thousands of songs. Every time you hit a hotspot the device will sync and update the station. Plenty of music is available from Fergie to… → Read More
Today at CTIA, Slacker announced that come October they will have a full fledged app ready to roll on BlackBerry devices. I previewed this yesterday on a Bold that happened to be T-Mobile branded, but it’s probably a European model. Anyway, the app was integrated into the BB very well and left rather impressed. The app and service are free, but you do have the option of the pay service should… → Read More
When you’ve seen one unboxing, you’ve pretty much seen them all. Laptop points out that the player is big and bulky, but it does have a 4-inch screen. Umm. Why do you need such a large screen for a device that doesn’t play video? The UI is very similar to the Web site so you won’t get discombobulated when using it. It has a touch strip for the sake of having some touch… → Read More
Was anyone really surprised that Slacker delayed shipment of their player multiple times? Come on! With a name like Slacker it was inevitable. Anyway, pre-orders began shipping today. In case you wanted to know. → Read More
Lovers of Slacker Radio, prepare to shower me with petals of rare flowers, delicious food, and promises of sexual favors, for I bring news that the Slacker Portable, which has been delayed more times than Winehouse’s rehab visits, is finally set to ship tomorrow. For those not in the know, the Slacker Portable is a device not unlike an iPod or Zune, but it uses local Wi-Fi to load songs into… → Read More
http://progressive.playstream.com/playstream/progressive/flashplayers/FLVPlayer.swf So I groped the Slacker Portable last night. I’ve been hard on Slacker about how delayed its portable player has been. First it was supposed to be here by the end of the summer, then it was supposed to be here in December, then it got delayed again until the end of January. I hope it launches in the end of… → Read More
Tel Aviv, Israel based MeeMix, which we first covered in August, is kicking-off the New Year by moving their taste-predicting Internet radio service from closed to open Beta. Internet radio is already a very crowded space dominated by entrenched startups like Last.fm and Pandora. Smaller players and recent entrants such as SpiralFrog, Jango and Slacker are not increasing the breathing room. MeeMix… → Read More
Aaaaaaand, I’m done. That’s enough for me, thank you. I give up. First it was the end of summer, then it was mid-December, now it’s the end of January when the Slacker Portable is supposed to ship. I have no faith that it’ll ship on that date. Sorry. I’d been waiting to buy this thing since the moment it was announced. I had custom searches and RSS feeds set up for… → Read More
Social music recommendation service MyStrands has completed the second half of their B round, raising an additional $24 million from Spanish Bank BBVA on top of the $25 million we reported earlier. BBVA is a financial services group with more than $782 billion in total assets, 42 million customers in 40 countries and a market capitalization of approximately $95 billion. This brings total financing… → Read More
Well it’s here (almost). Although promised by the end of the summer, the Slacker Portable is now available for pre-order and should ship in mid-December. You shouldn’t think of it as an MP3 player, per se, although you can load MP3 and WMA files onto the device. Think of it more as a personal portable radio. You listen to songs and rate them. The ones you hate never show up again and… → Read More
CrunchGear is reporting that users of the yet to be released Slacker MP3 player will be able to transfer their ‘personalized stations’ to the player with a single click and refresh them via Wi-Fi or USB. Slacker’s basic music service is similar to Pandora, providing based music player that customizes stations based on whether you like or dislike specific tracks that are free to use and… → Read More
Radio gives you two important things: It keeps you from getting in a musical rut, and you don’t have to make any decisions about what to listen to next. Now that customizable Internet radio services like Last.fm and Slacker are all the rage, the time has never been better for Apple to let iPod users get a piece of the action. I smell an iPod + Slacker partnership now that Apple got GooTube to… → Read More
When Slacker initially launched their three prong web, desktop, and portable music service, we felt they needed a lot of cash in the bank to take on incumbents like Last.fm and iTunes. It looks like they got that start, with the addition of a whopping $40 million on top of the original $13.5 million series A, according to PEHub. Centennial Ventures and Rho Ventures were new investors, with Austin… → Read More
One of the more ambitious entrants on the social music scene, Slacker, has released the second piece of their three-part music personalization suite, a desktop music player. Slacker’s player shares a lot of the core functionality of MyStrands and Last.fm. Users create a personalized radio stream by entering a keyword into the player. There is no rewind and specific songs can not be played. → Read More
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