Slacker Works to Reinvent Radio

The 9Lives Of Radio
April 2, 2013
When Radio Ratings Don’t Add Up
April 16, 2013

Slacker Works to Reinvent Radio

Since 2006, Slacker has been committed to giving users the best music experience possible. Slacker recently completed a major upgrade and now offers its 4+ million users more than 13 million songs, deep customization tools, and a unique team of expert music curators and hosts who constantly update Slacker’s more than 200 genre and specialty stations.

This new look has been created to better compete against booming services such as Pandora, Spotify and iHeartRadio. The six-year-old service is tweaking its approach with a slew of new features and hand-picked song matches instead of ones based on an algorithm.

Slacker aims to fortify its current base of four million monthly users to compete with Pandora’s market share (65 million). Boasting 10 times as many songs as Pandora, Slacker – with apps now available for iOS, Android, Windows Phones and BlackBerry — Slacker has been redesigned to make finding new music much more intuitive for users. The new, intuitive navigation and modern features are a big improvement from its previous model. Slacker has also replaced its stale interface design with a Facebook-like blue and grey.

Instead of auto-selecting tunes based on an artists’ entire library, the songs, artists and playlists have all been hand-selected by Slacker staffers , rather than using algorithms or out-of-the-box matching.

The new experience also allows a user add in news, sports and talk from channels such as ABC and ESPN. This means while personally-selected radio stations are playing, Slacker will pull in news at the top of the hour, as an imitation of listening to a live station.

Although Slacker is free on any device, users can subscribe to its ad-free service — called Slacker Radio Plus — for $3.99 each month. Creating custom playlists and accessing the full on-demand experience, costs $9.99 monthly.

Slacker also launched its “Artists to Watch in 2013” station, giving listeners a sneak peek at the songs, albums and artists if believes will define 2013, long before the festival lineups are announced and new albums drop.  www.slacker.com/station/Artists-to-Watch-2013.

The station was handcrafted by Slacker’s team of music curators who blend the art of radio programming with the science of analyzing user data to help listeners discover new songs and artists alongside the music they already love.

“Twenty million songs and a search box makes discovering new music harder, not easier — which is where Slacker comes in,” said Jonathan Sasse, Slacker SVP of product and programming. “Slacker’s team of music experts helps listeners navigate millions of songs and makes music discovery fun, easy and effortless.”

Slacker’s top picks highlighted on the “Artists to Watch In 2013” include:

  • A$AP Rocky – AlunaGeorge – Alt-J – Angel Haze – Charli XCX – Churchill – Conor Maynard – Dan Croll – Danny Brown – Drake White – Duologue – Earl Sweatshirt – Emeli Sande – Girl’s Generation – Gold Fields – Jake Bugg – Kacey Musgraves – Merchandise – Pacific Air – Paloma Faith – Parmalee – Porter Robinson – Robert DeLong – ScHoolBoy Q – St. Lucia – The Mowgli’s – Trinidad James – Wild Cub

If you’ve yet to include Slacker in your media mix, the service merits consideration on your next buy.  The Radio Agency can help layer in these “pure play” services and digital streaming to complement any local or national campaign. All digital streaming platforms, like Slacker, have the ability to target users on a national level, by market, or even as granular as by zip code. Please allow us to keep your campaigns vibrant with all the newest and most exciting digital advances, custom-created to make your radio advertising buy more efficient.

Tami Freeman is the Media Director of The Radio Agency. Please follow The Radio Agency’s Blog “Sounding Board” by subscribing to the email or RSS links above.Visit our website TheRadioAgency.com