Friday, March 16, 2007

Slacker: Dead On Arrival?

Slacker is an internet radio service. Didn't internet radio just get slapped with some heavy royalty rates, basically making it impossible to survive?

Aspire to be a Slacker
Jasmine France, http://crave.cnet.com

What do you get when you take the ex-CEOs of Musicmatch, Rio, and iRiver America and lock them in a room with a stack of data about the digital-music landscape? How about a revolutionary new music service and a portable device to go along with it?

Enter Slacker, a company chock full of digital music experts (mostly transplants from Musicmatch and Rio), and its two babies: Slacker.com (an online music service) and the Slacker portable device. That's quite a few Slackers, and it's also the point. As it turns out, about 70 percent of music enthusiasts don't want to spend hours creating the perfect playlists, which means most of you are slackers just like me. (Ha!) To break it down even further, 51 percent of MP3 player users update their content only once a month or less, and 46 percent don't update more often because they don't have time. Several services have aimed to address this issue, such as MTV Urge with its Auto-Mix feature and Rhapsody with Channels.

Slacker.com takes a slightly different tack, namely because you don't have to pay for it: It's Internet radio, rather than a traditional music service....read more: here

Labels: internet radio, slacker