If cell phones have internet access, and internet radio has moved to the portable space (e.g. Pandora on iPhones, and the recent announcement of Slacker.com and BlackBerry maker Research In Motion [RIM] teaming up), how long before internet radio is just radio—radio like it should be—songs you want without a DJ ‘personality’ interrupting the vibe? It’s not like Clear Channel stations are live, so what’s the difference? Buffer times? I can live with that. Hey, isn’t this what satellite was supposed to deliver?   

As I’ve stated before, I like Pandora, though have found it difficult to stay on any one internet station for very long. And I’ve always felt Pandora’s UI was clunky. I do, however, give them credit for some great content on their site in the way of videos about how music is played, produced, and categorized.

More and more I find myself being a late adopter—somewhere in the second wave, giving tribute to the first wave who’ve been sacrificed on the ‘too quick to market’ capitalist altar. The first wave plays a role in helping shape a product or technology’s trajectory, usually at the expense of frustration and high prices. The second wave misses out on influence, but we don’t mind—if we did we’d be in the first wave.

So in keeping with this second wave mentality, I’ve recently found myself stuck on Slacker radio, which is in the midst of a big second wave push.  

No matter what internet radio provider I use, I always end up giving my stations too much input and turn them into some diluted and scattered mix of tunes that lack enough musical meat to sink my teeth into. Then I start a new station until I over-season it into an unrecognizable private hit parade. Last time I was on Pandora, I had at least 12 personal stations, and they were all broken. I somehow had gotten ’80s hip-hop on my guitar hero station. And my station featuring the Police and the Jam ended up hemorrhaging hits from the Tubes circa 1983. (Hey, I love the Tubes. “What do you want from Life?” A radio station without “She’s a Beauty”!)

Frankly, my first encounter with Slacker was typical for web radio. But then, I went for the premium membership, where you pay mere dollars a month for the full Slacker Monty. I have the sweetest station right now, and with no risk of over-seasoning because it took little time and effort to get things dialed in. I have one Slacker station, and it plays one great song (to me) after another, so I’m rarely tempted to tell it to find this or play that. As a veteran mix-tape geek, it is the first time in years that I have heard any radio station, streamed, beamed, or terrestrial, with the finesse required to play well a truly eclectic mix.

Slacker’s UI looks cool and is friendly to use. I prefer their downloadable mini player to the browser-based one. But browser-based Slacker radio (which the mini player will push you to) is where you’ll find the slider of heavenly joy—the artist discovery slider. Too often artist discovery is either ON, or on just a little bit. With Slacker, you can turn it off. You can set it high when you launch, tighten it down as the radio settles into the groove you desire, and then off when you just want to hear some fucking Rush, alright?!

Slacker is also a hardware company. They’ve just launched their 2.0 player, the Slacker G2. I would say their player is what makes Slacker different, but that would be ignoring how good their radio is at making custom stations. Nonetheless, the Slacker player is a great concept—an iPod that thinks. They have two models; the difference is only in capacity. The top line G2 can hold up to 4,000 songs (or 500 Rush prog-rock anthems), and up to 40 stations. It works like this: You dial in your Slacker radio online, and then with a click you send it to your player over USB or Wi-Fi. Those songs now live in your G2 player forever, unless you decide to delete or replace them. The player doesn’t stream the songs, it just loads them as data into the player so you can play them regardless of Wi-Fi access. This gives you the music anywhere, anytime, and without the hiccups and latency involved with streaming data over Wi-Fi or satellite. You tell the player when to upload, and it can phone home if you charge it where there is Wi-Fi access. Any input you give your player is used to remove and send new material.

You don’t have to send an entire station either; you can send just a song or group of songs you’ve marked as favorites in the web player. If you buy the player from Slacker.com, they will load it with whatever station you like, including your own. If you buy it at a store, it comes with a handful of their most popular genre stations.

I haven’t used the player, but I wonder if it makes Slacker feel less like radio and more like an mp3 player. When I talked to Slacker about it, it’s clear it is developed as a radio. With that said, they do offer limited space where you can load your own mp3s onto it.

This hardware aspect of Slacker is getting a lot of buzz. It is a new business model for web radio. Instead of relying solely on pennies per view banner ads and subscription fees, which are historically very low for web radio, they can co-rely on hardware sales.

Those hardware sales would be nonexistent if the radio wasn’t so good. That is due in part to the kind of parameter control Slacker gives both its free and premium customers. These parameters include four artist discovery modes and five popularity choices so you can have it play an artist’s hits, B-sides, or both. It also gives you control over what era the music comes from. Essentially, all the things that are maddening about artist and song discovery in web radio can be controlled to a fairly fine point on Slacker. These options are not obvious at first, but they play a huge role in dialing in the perfect station.

Slacker’s free version limits the listener to a limited number of skips (clicking a button to dump a song and move on to the next) and requests (specific songs you tell it to play). The free version also plays ads that Slacker says will only run about once an hour. The premium service removes those limitations and it saves your favorite songs in a library so you can play them when you want (both over the web or the G2 player). And switching from their free to paid service or vice versa does not affect your library. It is preserved. Cooler still, you do not need the premium service to use Slacker’s portable player.

A profitable internet radio station is no sure thing. But I believe Slacker’s challenge isn’t in delivering what they promise and making money at it, it’s getting people to understand what they offer, and to believe that radio can do all this.

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