Guest author Patrick Reynolds is currently an Executive Vice President at Triton Digital and a former ad guy.

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 that their accents will make even the Brits envious. American agencies all have European envy, and Spotify is certifiably a big deal abroad. Agency status meetings will be preceded by Absolut and herring in honor of Spotify’s arrival.

The bottom line: where others bat their eyes to catch agency attention, Spotify already has them lined up and swooning. That’s a big advantage.

To be a wishbone.

Traditional radio buyers will claim Spotify is the next-generation in radio. Digital buyers will argue that if it’s consumed via computer or mobile phone, it’s digital. They’ll butt heads like those rams you see on the Discovery Channel or in pickup commercials. My guess is digital departments or shops will usually win if Pandora is any guide. The real cage match will occur over budgets as the victor, now fully kicking sand at the vanquished, will ask for some of the rival’s budget to spend with Spotify. Otherwise well-adjusted people will resort to tactics that would make Lisbeth Salander blanch.

The bottom line: Spotify will further test agency models of who does what, and at what compensation level.

Stiffer competition than imagined.

It’s very interesting how competitors like to categorize one another. Pandora is “not radio” to a lot of radio folks. It’s playlist-based and therefore . . . different. Whatever you call it, to my mind it’s competing for ears and attention. That’s why I maintain that the biggest competitor to “radio” by any definition is the iPod and its ilk. Everyone is competing to be the preferred provider of music and other audio-based content. I honestly don’t think listeners delineate between devices or playlists vs. live content. All that said, Pandora’s been spotted a significant lead.

Slacker is absolutely massive in mobile. Rhapsody scratches a similar itch. And oh yeah, there are also thousands of local terrestrial stations looking to take the piss out of Spotify from the moment they hang their shingle. The difference between European markets and the U.S. cannot be understated.  In the UK , for instance, there are dozens of sizable stations. In Buffalo alone there are dozens. In New York there are hundreds. In the US there are thousands. Spotify will be that moose that stumbled upon thousands of bears just waking from hibernation. Those bears may have hated each other yesterday, but today they all agree that they want to take that moose down, perhaps collaboratively.

The bottom line: the importance of being “local” versus “personal” will be further tested.

To get better.

For all the reasons above, Spotify will evolve and improve if it is to survive over here. This is an elbows-out kind of country. Out of necessity, Swedish civility will eventually give way to good ol’ Yankee bare-knuckled aggression. They’ll advance the conversation about royalties and hopefully bring some clarity to that nightmare. They’ll give some competitors a haircut. Some of the weaker ones may even fold. But Spotify won’t sew it up as some predict. The US is just too big and diverse to be conquered by one insurgent. Incumbents are well funded, determined to maintain what they’ve built, and practiced at doing so.

The bottom line: the game’s changing. And getting more interesting. Technology’s making this a competition on content, not geography. I predict listeners will care a lot less about where you’re from than what you’ve got. Soon we’ll find out who’s got what. Welcome to America. Contrary to popular opinion, not everyone gets a trophy just for showing up.

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”.

Pressed, a spokesperson would only say that Slacker has identified a solid business model in 2010 (perhaps the one Michael Arrington deemed ‘not quite a scam but close’?), and that it would be ‘leveraging mobile and automotive relationships’ this year.

Indeed, Slacker’s intention is to partner with car makers to equip vehicles with its personal radio service. A deal with Audi is supposedly already in place, although I was unable to find any information about that on the Web (not even on Slacker’s press releases archive).

Slacker, evidently a rival to Pandora, also offers mobile apps for BlackBerry, iOS, Android, Palm webOS and Windows Mobile / Phone 7. The service is available in the United States and Canada – Slacker boasts licensing agreements with all major labels.

A premium subscription sets you back $4.99 per month or $3.99 per month if you opt for an annual subscription rather than a monthly one. This will enable you to do unlimited skips, cache radio stations and also comes with no ads.

Slacker’s spokesperson says the company will soon debut a true music-on-demand service that will work much like MOG, Rhapsody and Rdio.

Anyone care to place on a bet on if it will launch before Spotify hits the US?

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 Million Songs
*A Pony (Prize is not available)

Sounds great, right? (Note the fine print about the pony. You don’t really get a pony.)


To win, tell us what song or band you would name your pony after and why. I’ll pick two first prize winners and three second prize winners on Monday.

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 for their Pandora One service.

The frustration from users isn’t that Slacker charges more. It’s how they market the premium product. Pandora straight up says they’ll charge you $36 to upgrade. No misleading marketing statements. You pay $36 and you get Pandora One for a year.

But Slacker tricks you. They give you a seven day free trial and say it’s $3.99 a month after that. But you get billed for the whole year – $48 – after that seven day period is over. And if you don’t want want to pay for that year, you have to cancel during the seven day period.

Compare the Slacker marketing pitch above to the straighforward way Pandora handles premium subscriptions in the image to the right.

Back to that enraged user. After seeing a $48 charge from Slacker on his credit card when he expected $3.99, emailed Slacker for an explanation, and then tried to cancel. He was denied (messages in chronological order):

Slacker: We hope you have been enjoying the benefits of Slacker Radio Plus. Your subscription has reached its renewal date. Your credit card was charged $47.88 on 08/26/2009 and your Slacker Radio Plus service will continue uninterrupted. Your auto-renewal date is: 08/18/2010. To adjust your account settings at any time, simply log into your Slacker account and enter the Account Management section. Thank you for listening, Slacker

Customer: i was under the understanding I was going to be billed monthly at 3.99 per month. Please advise.

Slacker: Slacker subscription are billed annually. We don’t currently offer a monthly billing plan.

Customer: Please cancel my subscription – thats misleading – should consider revising your message.

Slacker: Once the subscription has past the 7-day trial, you can go through our web site as described below to cancel your subscription so that, once your current subscription has expired, you will not be renewed for another subscription. However, the subscription has to be canceled within the 7-day trial per the contract you agreed to when you signed up for the free trial in order to avoid being billed.

So if you sign up for the free seven day Slacker trial, don’t be surprised when you’re billed for a whole year and can’t cancel. Pandora, by contrast, does give partial refunds. I contacted the company today and they said “It’s a year agreement, but we of course do refunds when people call to request them.”

The difference in how these companies market to customers and then treat them later is night and day. No wonder Pandora is so much more popular – tricking a few people to pay you $48 is fine, but clear messaging and proper customer service will win in the end:

If for some reason Slacker hasn’t been uploaded to your Tour, pull the battery and restart. You should see a icon on the home screen when it powers back on that prompts you to download the app.

If for some reason Slacker hasn’t been uploaded to your Tour, pull the battery and restart. You should see a icon on the home screen when it powers back on that prompts you to download the app.

The Walkmans are available for pre-order at Sony’s site; $299 for the 16GB version and $399 for the 32GB version. Each contains a 3-inch OLED touchscreen, podcast and YouTube access, up to 33 hours of music playback on a single charge, web browsing, and the aforementioned Slacker feature.

According to the product description:

“Slacker Radio comes integrated on the X Series. Once you register your Walkman MP3 player with Slacker.com, you can choose up to 3 stations of music. Each station is cached on the device and can be refreshed using a Wi-Fi connection. Best of all, it’s free.”

There’s no mention of whether or not you’ll be able to subscribe to Slacker’s premium service. Perhaps that’ll be added later. The devices are expected to ship on or around June 20th.

OLED Touch Screen Walkman [SonyStyle.com via Electronista]

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.

You can listen to free, lightly ad-supported streaming radio on the device or pay $7.50 per month strip out commercials and be able to download tracks directly to the 8GB of storage.

Slacker 8GB WiFi Internet Radio Player [sellout.woot.com via Gear Diary]

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 – that’s for a new unit, too, not a refurbished one (Geeks.com sells a fair amount of refurbished stuff).

Keep in mind that the second generation of the Slacker Portable, the G2, is now out. Our own Peter Ha called it “10x better than the first gen device,” but it starts at $199.

If you just want to get in the game, $55 for the first-generation device might not be that bad.

Slacker Portable 2GB Personal Radio Player [Geeks.com]

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 like good additions.

Full release after the jump…

SONY ADDS SLACKER PERSONAL RADIO TO BRAVIA INTERNET VIDEO LINK SERVICE

Howcast Also Added to Expanding Channel Line Up

SAN DIEGO, Nov. 19, 2008 – Sony today introduced Slacker Personal Radio and Howcast Media as the latest Sony^® BRAVIA^® Internet Video Link content providers.

Slacker Personal Radio delivers millions of licensed songs and more than 100 individually programmed genre music stations, while Howcastoffers up a selection of its engaging how-to videos. Both channels offer content at no additional charge to BRAVIA Internet Video Link users.

“Internet content is expanding faster than ever and Sony is bringing it straight to BRAVIA televisions,” said Randy Waynick, senior vice president of Sony Electronics’ Home Products Division. “Slacker andHowcast are great examples of new types of entertainment that are bridging the gap from an Internet experience to entertainment shared in the living room.”

Slacker’s library of CD-quality music across all genres and eras ensures that music lovers can enjoy radio stations on their BRAVIA HDTV ranging from music of the golden-era classics to today’s hottest hits. By simply linking their BRAVIA Internet Video Link to your online Slacker account, users can easily enjoy their own custom Slacker stations created online where they have fine-tuned categories to set artist, year, popularity and more.

Slacker’s service also allows users to personalize choice across the web, BRAVIA Internet Video Link, Slacker G2 or soon on BlackBerrysmartphones, ensuring that your favorite artists and ratings follow you to whatever device you’re using.

Recently named a top website of 2008 by both Time and PC Magazine, Howcast.com features useful how-to videos and guides. Howcast will offer nearly 100 videos on the BRAVIA Internet Video Link including select content from channels like “Hot How-To’s,” “Fun & Games,” “Food & Drink,” “Home & Family,” and “Health & Beauty.”

The BRAVIA Internet Video Link Module, which attaches to the back of a compatible BRAVIA TV, streams on-demand entertainment including hit movies, televisions shows, user generated videos, and a variety of other high-definition and standard-definition content not found on network or cable/satellite TV. The module connects to the Internet via an existing broadband Ethernet connection and streams content, much of which is available at no additional charge.

The Slacker and Howcast channels add to the existing BRAVIA Internet Video Link lineup, which already includes Amazon Video OnDemand; YouTube; Dailymotion; CBS; Yahoo!; Sports Illustrated; blip.tv;CondéNet’s Style.com, Men.Style.com, Epicurious, Wired.com and Concierge.com channels; Sony Pictures’ Crackle, and others.

The device is currently available for about $300 and can be purchased online at www.sonystyle.com, Sony Style retail stores and Sony authorized retailers across the country.

That’s all the updated info and if you’re interested then keep reading for a full-on review.

Hardware

The G2 is super, tiny and easily portable. The exact dimensions are as follows: 87x53x13.5mm and weighs only 2.5 ounces. The screen may look small (320×240), but it’s big enough to show album art, an artist picture, biography and album review. All of this can be accessed with the old BlackBerry-like scroll wheel. You can “favorite” or “block” tracks via the top two buttons. The rest of button scheme is simple with a play/pause, forward and rewind button located on the bottom half. Volume controls are found on the top of the player next to the 3.5mm headphone jack. A “back” button is located just below the scroll wheel that is mainly used when navigating the menu system.

You can charge and sideload tracks over USB. Depending on which model you choose to purchase, your stations will sync over USB or Wi-Fi. Syncing over Wi-Fi takes a long time, like, hours depending on how many stations you choose. I’m unsure about it over USB since I’m on a Mac, though. However, you can have Slacker pre-load your stations and everything else when you purchase through them. Even though it takes a while to sync you’re getting a ton of music, so I can live with that. I synced before going to bed and you don’t necessarily have to sync all that often.

The hardware is easy to use and much improved over the previous model. There’s a 30-pin connector located on the bottom that will work with upcoming power adapters, FM transmitter and speaker docks. Also included in this model is a custom EQ and volume normalization options. You can purchase through Slacker or Amazon now, but it will ship to Best Buy stores this month. The G2 includes a case with removable clip, USB cable, USB-compatible power supply, and premium-ears. Admittedly I did not try these out since I’ve been testing out Shure’s new SE 110 in-ears, but I’ll update shortly.

Service

This is the bread and butter for Slacker. There are over two million tracks available and they’re CD quality, which is a very good thing considering all you audiophiles will want to know about that. When you rate, fave or ban tracks on the player itself it syncs with your online account and vice versa.
Experts maintain the 100+ stations and the variety is quite good. I rarely found myself skipping tracks. The free service limits you to six track skips within one hour whereas the paid service costs $7.50 a month. The free service also subjects you to about one advertisement per hour, but you won’t find that with the paid subscription. Paying for the service gives the ability to save songs to your library and access them whenever you want with the paid service. This also gives the ability to go back to the previous song you were listening to. You can also request an unlimited number of songs to the most kickass custom stations as possible, but this, too, requires the paid service.

Depending on the model you choose, the number of stations you pick will vary the depth of songs you get in each station. So the less you have the more variety you get. You can sync over Wi-Fi whenever you have access and keys are also stored.

Overall, I’d recommend the G2 if you’re heavily invested in Slacker’s online service and even if you’re not, then you should get one anyway. It’s free music that’s constantly changing and, for someone like me, that’s a good thing. I get stuck listening to the same stuff over and over again.

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 Bad Company. If you don’t like something, you can ban the song or artist. Conversely, if you do like something you hear, you can rate the artist or get more info. I didn’t see a “buy now” link, but I’ll bet donuts to dollars somebody is working on that.

Read the rest and see some pics over at MobileCrunch.

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 Bad Company. If you don’t like something, you can ban the song or artist. Conversely, if you do like something you hear, you can rate the artist or get more info. I didn’t see a “buy now” link, but I’ll bet donuts to dollars somebody is working on that.

For now, there doesn’t seem to be a way to access playlists beyond what’s next and what was recently heard. While this might make sense for streaming radio stations, it should probably be an integrated feature if a station is living in the cache.

Overall, the service worked fine when not trying to do too much. Music was played, music was listened too. Switching between stations seemed to me a little slow, but the ability to edit playlists within a station means you might not be flipping around the dial so much. Control was pretty easy and intuitive, with basic menu commands available in a pop up menu.

The app looked best to me on the new Pearl Flip 8220, due to its vertical screen. The differences between the Bold and Curve were minimal. That’s the Bold up there on top. The Curve is below, and the new Pearl Flip below that.

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 you choose to go that route. Our boys on the floor at CTIA will have a video demo shortly.

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 controls. Refreshing content wirelessly seems to be a breeze and is quite fast. It doesn’t sound all that impressive, but we’ll soon find out when we get our paws on one.

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 the device which are played for your, and you rate them, as you do on the Slacker website.

For those who like social networking mixed in with their music, this is the player for you, and you can thank me for the news later.

Slacker Portable Ships Tomorrow. What’s Next? [Laptop, whom we bested in Beer Pong at CES, just so's ya know]

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 January like it’s supposed to because I don’t think it’ll be able to survive another delay.

The player itself is pretty nice — much, much lighter than I thought. The device I had in my hands isn’t the finished version, though, so there might still be some things missing from its innards.

There was another interesting player on the Slacker table from Logitech. Logitech has been adding Slacker support to many of its more recent Internet radio and streaming audio devices, so look for more and more of these to come out over the coming months. This one (I’m pretty sure) won’t handle direct to device downloads like the Slacker Portable. Rather, it’ll transfer music from your computer’s Slacker player software and stream it or transfer it, depending on whether or not it’s got built-in storage.