In mid March, Dennis Mudd, former CEO of MusicMatch, Jonathan Sasse, former President of iriver America, and Jim Cady, former CEO of Rio officially unveiled plans to offer music lovers the ultimate personalized and portable radio experience via their new San Diego-based start-up, Slacker.com. Their vision of the personalized radio experience makes use of a new beta interface (available for free download at slacker.com) that allows users to customize their own radio stations and soon, by means of new devices to be rolled out this summer, you can listen to them on demand at virtually any location. The Slacker portable radio players will operate via Wi-Fi and Slacker satellite car kits. The customized music will be continuously refreshed and stored for playback, allowing for song skips and the elimination of satellite and Wi-Fi dropout.
The service is not impacted by the SoundExchange royalty collection agency, which would render the new endeavor fiscally impossible, because it cut deals with major and indie labels directly. Labels seemed more apt to accommodate the new delivery model due in part to the hiring of radio professionals that will program the stations to include more popular music and depth tracks while complying with the user’s ability to bookmark and ban certain tracks and artists to fit their listening tastes. An optional DJ feature will also be incorporated into the Slacker service, which will see a variety of radio personalities dolling out information about the artists being played.
“Personalized radio is a great way to listen to the music you love without having to work at it,” says Dennis Mudd, CEO of Slacker. “The only problem is that until now, personalized radio has been stuck on the PC. Slacker solves that problem. Now you can just kick back and listen.”
With millions of songs and over 10,000 genre and artist channels available, the size and scope of the service is widening, but personalization remains one of its most attractive assets. Options include adjusting your stations to play more popular vs. more eclectic music, newer vs. older music, or even to play more tracks bookmarked as favorites.
Slacker allows you to log in from any PC or Mac and listen to songs in CD quality. Playback can be achieved from a web player, jukebox software (coming soon) which combines your music library with the web client features, a slick portable player, and eventually the satellite car kits. Other features include the ability to click through album cover art, band profiles, reviews and artist photos and share custom stations with friends.
A new premium service will also be added to the Slacker environment. Slacker is currently offered only as a basic service, funded by advertising. Soon the pay service ($7.50/mo) will offer an experience void of advertising and afford users unlimited song skipping options (the basic skip rate is 6 songs an hour per channel) and the ability to save radio tracks to a library.
Mobilizing the personal radio experience is seemingly uncharted waters in the U.S. The advent of Broadband Instruments’ (Slacker’s company name during its stealthy development) portable listening devices seeks to combine not only custom radio on the go, but also the advantages of storing radio, MP3, WMA, and video files into the device’s hard drive. The portable players will range from $150-$300, depending on storage capacity. The built in Wi-Fi will make use of the music caching system and the Slacker DJ functions.
The device itself features a 4″ full screen display featuring album art /reviews, artist photos/bios and visualizations. It can also automatically save and refresh personalized stations via Wi-Fi, satellite or USB. Plans to partner with a broader range of devices are underway. Slacker went to great lengths to preserve the look and feel of the web and jukebox players, making the transition of use as seamless as possible for the consumer.
The satellite kits look to hit the market later in 2007. Car top antennas will pull down content via satellite at a higher rate and breadth than Wi-Fi at any one time. Look for a company outreach effort to car manufactures and the likelihood of the brand to extend internationally.
So far, the company has gone from obscurity to the tech spotlight in a matter of days. Bloggers and technofiles scoured the web and posted endless theories about the start up and its famous co-founders. An official rollout of the service transpired in Austin at this year’s SXSW Music Festival and was greeted with rabid enthusiasm.
“If you look at the big, competitive landscape,” says VP of Marketing Jonathan Sasse, “it’s not a bunch of little guys out there competing; it’s kind of a broad space. So with all the technology that we’re working on; with the different licenses that we’ve been working through; with the overall technology and the type of a player we’ve been looking to make, yeah, we had to stay very, very quiet.
For the most part, there was no discussion about what we were doing outside of our four walls, which made it difficult to bring on the talent that we needed sometimes. Trying to get somebody to come on board when they have no idea what you do is kind of tricky. But, luckily, as we built up our talent pool here, it became pretty compelling when we’d reach out to people and say: ‘We’d like you to come on board. We’ve got xyz people involved in this and we think it’s a really good plan,’ and people got excited about it.”
The prospect of programming a totally indulgent, politically unfettered range of radio stations was more than enough to entice former terrestrial radio veterans such as Scott Riggs, Slacker’s Director of Radio Programming.
“There are a lot of programmers, music directors and specialty show hosts out there who work at huge stations in huge markets and feel like they are very successful stations but, in the back of their minds they also feel like: Boy, if I could really open up the catalogue or if I could really take some more chances and play some more of these other bands, they would be a little bit more true to what the genre is, but they can’t do that. Here we’re giving them the opportunity to do that.”
Recently, Slacker, Inc. announced that Lon Levin, co-founder of XM Satellite Radio and satellite industry veteran, had joined the start-up as Senior Advisor.
With the ramp-up and viral rollout of Slacker underway, expect the competition to heat up in the wireless arenas, as more and more choices challenge the core paradigms of music delivery systems all across the globe.
** QB Content by Mike Bacon **
