Ross Rubin is director of industry analysis for consumer technology at market research and analysis firm The NPD Group.
Next week's column will further discuss the Slacker Portable controls and music listening experience as well as Slacker's plans to compete more directly with satellite radio. (Also, be sure to finish all that reading as before the track ends, as the artist info page will refresh as soon as a new song starts playing.) And indeed, Slacker displays extensive artist information from All Music Guide, but crams the information into the lower portion of the screen, requiring more scrolling.
Slacker defends the decision in part by noting that the larger screen is helpful for reading background information about the artist. The device includes a large 4-inch screen even though it cannot play video or even display photos, although it does nicely highlight album art. Slacker made some curious decisions in designing its portable, which is larger and chunkier than, say, an iPod classic.
Slacker assures that customers won't experience constant bombardment of upgrade exhortations as its business model works well even with the free tier of service and a player purchase. Slacker has a premium service available for about $7 per month that eliminates the commercials and allows an unlimited number of song skips. While the Sansa Connect relied on a premium music subscription to transfer tracks to the device, the basic tier of Slacker service - which includes two commercials and up to six skips per hour - is free. "Filling up" a station from scratch took about 10 minutes, but partial refills are faster. Upon connecting to the Slacker service via WiFi or a PC's USB port (the latter connection method does not support the Mac), the Slacker Portable caches hours of music for each of these stations. One nice touch is that a device ordered from Slacker comes pre-populated with any stations you have set up on the site. The device comes in three capacities that are billed as storing a different number of stations, which are either genres preset by the internet radio service available at, or customized for the user based on a particular artist. MP3 files can be loaded onto the device, but that feature is more of an afterthought. While that device was billed primarily as an MP3 player that boasted tight integration with the Yahoo! Music Unlimited service (now shuttering), the Slacker Portable is labeled as a "personal radio". The Slacker Portable picks up where last year's promising Sansa Connect left off. And a fourth are XM and Sirius, which now appear on track to merge in part due to the kind of competition that the Slacker Portable will ultimately provide. A third is the traditional consumer electronics industry for which it portends a connected future. Another is the bevy of online internet music sites such as Pandora, Last.fm, Finetune and others, to which it represents the leap from the beb to portable entertainment. One is the crop of portable MP3 players, to which the device's service represents free, fresh music on the go in exchange for user control of track selection. With the battle for supremacy now won, and digital music firmly entrenched in our lives, it’s now time to take the next step: It’s time to move from crappy MP3s and low-quality streams to high-resolution audio.The Slacker Portable is the proverbial elephant being inspected by blind men. The original Rio player, iPod, iPhone, PC, streaming devices, and the countless other devices that play and stream digital music have helped to transform the music and consumer electronics industries.Īlong the way, however, sound quality has generally taken a back seat to advances in usability, the amount of content available, customizability of the music experience, and convenience of having your music whenever and wherever you want it. These technologies took music from a physical format on CDs to one that could be stored or accessed on a digital player, tablet, phone, computer, or streaming device, making an enormous amount of audio available to consumers.
The MP3 format, and other compression codecs like AAC, Windows Media Audio, etc., have revolutionized the way music is distributed and consumed. In the last 15 years, as digital music has slowly but surely extinguished the analog flame, the focus with digital audio has always been on enabling easy access, portability, and manageability of the content.