Will Slacker be responsible for the Death of iPod?
Breaking the iPod’s stranglehold on the digital-music business would be no mean feat. Apple’s supremely simple device has 72 percent of the $21 billion market, and even Microsoft failed to make a dent. But what if there were an MP3 player that was even easier to use? That’s what we could get in June with the launch of the Slacker, a music player that automatically delivers tunes to you. All you have to do is decide whether or not you like them.
The Slacker is made by a San Diego startup of the same name, founded three years ago and led by the former CEOs of three of Apple’s (Charts, Fortune 500) digital-music rivals: iRiver (Jonathan Sasse), Musicmatch (Dennis Mudd) and Rio (Jim Cady). The first part of its service, 100 customizable Internet radio stations, launched in March. It’s from these stations that the device will download songs over Wi-Fi networks or satellite radio (with an optional car adapter).
The cheapest Slacker, with a 2-gigabyte flash drive, will cost $150; the largest, expected to have about 12GB, will be $400. The Slacker service comes free with banner ads or costs $7.50 a month without. When listening to a song, a user can press the “Love It” button to get more songs like it or the “Ban It” button to never hear it or its ilk again.