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That means it doesn’t need exponential growth to be successful, but it wants to be bigger than it is today.

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Slacker’s CEO Jim Cady tells me the service earns money even on free users, and pulls in solid margins from both tiers of paid customers. For $9.99 a month you also get Spotify-style on-demand service so you can search for and play any song you want any time. Most of Slacker’s service is free, though you can pay $3.99 a month for ad-free music. Because there’s no way you give a damn about both hockey and tennis. Say you only care about NCAA football, you can pick and choose what sports, leagues, and teams you want to hear about thanks to ESPN. Premium users can customize their sports news in a stunningly granular way. Beyond Pandora’s shallow thumbs up and thumbs down personalization, Slacker’s “Fine Tune” system lets you control sliders to hone in on older or newer music, discovery or your favorites, and popular or underground jams. You can also build your own stations from scratch, and pipe in news content and talk radio. The Slacker Stations tab lets you pick from 300 stations DJ’d be real people. A persistent control panel lets you browse all this content without interrupting the music.

You can instantly start playing music from these features, or click through for exclusive video interviews, concert clips, and bios.

It’s something Spotify and others haven’t quite figured out yet, so it’s a huge opportunity for Slacker.Įach day Slacker Music Guide offers seven highlights from its catalog, including artists of the week, playlists, music news, and deep dives into events like the Grammys. Discovery is critical when you have the world’s music library at your fingertips - 13 million songs from all the major labels and over 1000 indies in Slacker’s case.

Rather than dumping you into its music player and asking you to do the work of building stations, the new Slacker Music Guide fills the homepage with recommendations. It’s also improving its presence on home devices like SONOS, Sony and Logitech smart TVs, and will soon launch on Xbox.

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It’s pushing changes today for its website mobile apps for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, PALM, and BlackBerry that come pre-installed on phones from top carriers, plus its apps built into cars from Ford, GM, Chrysler, Honda, and other manufacturers. So now Slacker is turning up the volume with a big marketing push for its new design that makes it simpler for the average music fan but retains its geeky customization. Most people couldn’t even tell you what Slacker is. Spotify recently hit 20 million users and 5 million paying customers (1 million paying in the U.S.), Sirius XM satellite radio has around 24 million paid subscribers, and Pandora has over 175 million listeners. Despite starting in 2006 and offering a winning combo of customizable radio, on-demand streaming, and human DJ’d stations, it’s way behind the pack. It wants to claw mainstream users away from competitors with a “complete music service”. After hitting 4 million monthly users and 500,000 paid subscribers, Slacker today unveils a big redesign for its site, apps, and car integrations. You could discover a song on Pandora, search for more by the artist on Spotify, and get context from satellite radio DJs, or do it all in one place with Slacker.