A new Wi-Fi portable from Slacker
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
Amid all the news about a new batch o’ iPods, upgraded Zunes, phones that come with music and music that comes with MySpace, it would be easy to overlook the new portable players from Slacker. And that would be a shame, because they offer an intriguing value proposition. The new Slacker G2s, which went on sale online this week, carry a premium price tag -- they’re about $100 more than a comparable iPod Nano. But they’re tied to a free, personalized Internet radio service whose stations and playlists can be updated via Wi-Fi. In other words, they provide Internet radio to go, combined with the typical MP3 player functions and a couple of interesting tweaks.
In addition to being smaller and slicker, the new player will also be more widely available. It’s the first one to be sold by mass-market retailers (it’s due in Best Buy stores in mid-October). Still, my guess is that Slacker’s price and business model will confine it to a relatively small segment of the market, i.e. voracious consumers of music. But the offering exemplifies two important trends in the music biz: the shift toward storage in the cloud, and the effort to monetize ‘free’ songs.
Like the original Slacker player, the G2 is mainly for people who want someone else to pick the tracks they listen to -- say, people who can’t find the time or energy to create playlists for their MP3 players, or those who feel hemmed in by their own music collections. Most of its storage capacity is reserved for songs selected by Slacker -- 2,500 tracks on the base model, 4,000 on the more expensive one. The player’s software arranges these tracks into playlists, and eventually will insert commercials, too. (Jonathan Sasse, vice president of marketing, says there won’t be more than a couple of ads per hour. ‘Hammering people with advertisements is not the way we’ll make money.’) The songs and playlists match the ‘stations’ chosen by the user. Slacker has created dozens of genre-based stations, but users can make their own, artist-based ones, too, a la Pandora. Whenever you sync your player with the Slacker mothership online, it grabs new songs to replenish the stations’ playlists (and erases old ones -- remember, it’s like radio, not like Limewire). One reason the player is a bit pricey is that it can be replenished through Wi-Fi -- a nice feature when you’re away from home and eager for fresh tracks. In fact, I found the wireless feature easier to use than the USB connection, which I had trouble making work on my computers for some mystifying reason.
In short, the G2 acts as a way station between a giant online music collection and your ears. Although you can load it with some of your MP3s, you wouldn’t buy it to use it as an iPod-like jukebox -- what differentiates it from iPods is the Slacker service, and the free version doesn’t allow you to pick the songs it plays. So why not just use a radio? Because the the Slacker programming is *way* better than any over-the-air broadcaster’s offering. Depending on how much effort you put into setting up your own stations, the results can be more satisfying than satellite radio, too. For example, you can limit a playlist to the artists you specifically choose, provided that you choose 15 or more. (Personally, I think the real value is in letting the service introduce you to artists and tracks you don’t know, based on a few of your favorites. But that’s just me.)
As much as I like the Slacker concept and several of the G2’s features, my enthusiasm is tempered by a few shortcomings. The battery life on the G2 wasn’t impressive -- it’s supposedly 15 hours, but my device didn’t last that long. Some genres seemed a bit short on artists, and some artists popped up in too many of my playlists. I felt constrained by feedback buttons on the player that let me ban or favor individual tracks, but not artists or albums. I was irked by the inability to create hybrid stations out of genres -- e.g., reggae and funk. And I wished for a list of the songs I had marked as favorites, many of which I’d never heard before, liked immediately and quickly forgot.
Slacker’s premium service lets you save copies of the songs you like and listen to them on demand. But the copies aren’t permanent -- they can’t be burned onto CD or transferred onto an iPod. So it seems a stretch to expect people to pay $10 a month for the service, even if it does allow you assemble playlists of specific songs and to skip over an unlimited number of tracks (the free service limits you to six skips per hour of listening per playlist). After all, $10 isn’t much less than it would cost for a fully on-demand service such as Napster (which doesn’t let you keep the songs, either), and its subscriber numbers have been going down, not up. It will be hard enough for Slacker to sell premium priced MP3 players with free music. But I think the offer will be appealing to some music lovers, if Slacker isn’t lost in the din.
-- Jon Healey
Healey writes editorials for The Times’ Opinion Manufacturing Division.
Slacker G2 photo by Slacker.com.
