Slacker: Freeware Radio

Slacker is many things that we'll barely touch on in this post, but its' freeware radio deserves PCWorld's #1 choice as best freeware product in their recent edition spotlighting the best for free. I had never heard of it, although I was an avid fan of MusicMatch before it was sold to Yahoo! by Dennis Mudd, founder of Slacker.

Slacker sports nearly 100 genre stations, and somewhere around 10,000 artist stations that play the best of the chosen artist mixed with related musicians. Best of all, you can define your own custom station. If this isn't enough for free, then look into these options: choose whether you like new or older material, or if you want new music and artists introduced - a little bit to a lot. If you hear something you don't like, ban it from your station forever...you can do this six times an hour. Pick whether you want a DJ or not. and you may hear 2 commercials an hour, but I haven't so far.



I had a favorite radio station that never talked or played a promo over a song. This radio station didn't play the same song in a 24 hour period. Best of all, it played a wide variety of songs by my favorites, but all that is gone now. My favorites have one token song played.

Slacker has 50 artists in my custom list and it sounds remarkably like my old favorite station except for the lack of commercials - I say my ears don't get a rest because 12 minutes of commercials are not coming on per hour. It's music, Music, MUSIC!

I'll fault them one, though, and that is this: Slacker starves you for your favorite artist. You hardly ever hear them. I say it's because they want you to buy their premium service. At $7.50/month get ad free radio, skip as many tunes as you want, and save tracks to your personal library, where you can listen to them as often as you like. There's also the Slacker Portable Radio from $199 to $299.

To read more about Slacker:

http://archive.laptopmag.com/Features/Interview-with-Slacker-CEO-Dennis-Mudd.htm?page=3