Slacker, why iPod killer?
So, I was looking over techmeme last night and came across its link to this article on Slacker. It’s a pretty interesting service that aims to be a lot like Last.fm/Pandora in that you can specify songs you like and it will create playlists from it’s library (of 2 million songs) and stream them to you. The hook is that in addition to streaming to web based players it will have a hardware component the size of a blackberry that will get satellite reception of the streams. Cool!
Some confusing things are that I believe that in the player, web based and satellite, it’s all Last.fm style, you can say what songs you like but you can’t specify particular songs you want to listen to. But they also have an desktop application where you can, I believe, have subscription style access to their library. So, as long as you’re paying them the fee you get to listen to whatever you want on the desktop. I don’t *think* though that you can then stream those playlists to your portable player, which kind of sucks.
I’ve seen some talk about this being an iPod killer but I just don’t see that. Without being able to listen to your own music, it seems much more like a competitor to the online radio stations as well as satellite radio (XM/Sirius). I can’t tell if it is taking the community approach of Last.fm or the algorithmic approach of Pandora to find related songs and artists. I hope it’s the former, but I guess we’ll see.
I’m not sure how successful this would be, it seems like something pretty easy for XM to add to their offering, and the subscription price doesn’t seem much cheaper. Although, I suppose Slacker also has a free option (you still buy the hardware) that streams you radio with ads, but I don’t know how wide that appeal will be, when you can just buy an ipod and listen commercial free or by a radio and get maybe less targetted music, but spend a lot less on the player.
