Online Review (E)
The new media group under analysis is a relatively new company busting onto the portable music spectrum, Slacker Inc. Under the operation of a couple notably historic CEO failures (of formerly known MusicMatch and Rio), Dennis Mudd and Jim Cady were looking to broaden their horizons with a new product. In the past couple of years they have made much headway.
In 2007, they started out by introducing a flash music player on MySpace, which sparked interest in that it could potentially be embedded anywhere, consisting of a simple media player, featuring volume, play, pause, skip and album art functionalities. In that same year, Slacker made serious attempts at starting a credible company in the industry. They partnered with 4 major music labels (Sony BMG Music Entertainment, EMI, Universal, and Warner and began taking pre-orders for their breadwinner: The Slacker Portable Radio Player.
Consumers hopping on the Slacker bandwagon have the capability to listen to Slacker Radio stations on a digital audio device. The Slacker Portable automatically connects to Slacker’s music library over Wi-Fi when in wireless range, or over USB when attached to an Internet connected PC. Instead of live streaming of songs, the Slacker Portable fills itself up with a user’s personalized music choices each time the Player is refreshed.
Sounds like a pretty interesting device, huh? To me it sounds like a cheap knock-off of the popular XM Radio, where consumers have the ability to take hundreds of radio stations on the move. The most interesting aspect I see of the Slacker Portable Radio is not only does the user have complete control over what is on his/her particular station, but there is also the option to listen to professionally created stations. In essence, consumers now have the capability to play General Manager of a radio station, tweaking what is played according to his/her taste. Where users do have the option to upload music onto the device, much like the traditional iPods, the innovative feature of music-on-the-go makes uploading an afterthought.
Slacker.com currently has over 2 million songs, organized into over 100 professionally programmed stations, 10,000 artist stations, and an unlimited number of personally created stations. At a reasonable cost, as opposed to it’s competition, and a relatively cheap monthly service, Slacker seems to be a legitimate product…until the iPod Touch seriously comes down in price.
