Online Radio Site Slacker Adding Premium, Paid Tier

Yet another leading Internet radio service has added a subscription or "premium" tier to its site's offerings, and another nail is driven into the coffin that holds the music industry's old business model.

Options, Options, Options

Slacker, an audio streaming site much like Pandora has announced today that it will offer a new level of service that will give its customers even more control over what they listen to. Slacker Premium Radio will allow its customers to find, play, and replay one song or an entire album from the site's cache of recorded material. Slacker's biggest distinction from Pandora is the ability to truly customize user stations by telling Slacker which related artists you want to play.

The bigger picture here of course is that yet another site is offering a relatively inexpensive alternative to buying music. Slacker does offer listeners the chance to click a link and purchase the track they just listened to, of course. One has to wonder how many subscribers do end up actually buying any tracks. What Slacker Premium is offering is basically an 8 million song library for its users at the cost of less than one album per month.

Yet another plank is being steadily pulled out from under the record labels and in turn the music business. While sites like Slacker and Pandora pay licensing fees to record labels, the bottom line is that the industry has depended for decades on music fans buying an entire album; Slacker and Pandora now give listeners a chance to have nearly unlimited options at their disposal, without swimming through a sea of unwanted material.

The Casual Music Fan: Where The Real Money Is

It's not the die-hard audiophiles that the record industry is afraid of losing; or the intensely driven collectors. It's the casual music fan, the person who likes what they hear on the radio, but doesn't necessarily fret over its place in the annals of musical history, that drives the music business. Slacker Radio is a direct swipe at the monopoly the record labels held over the casual fans dollars for so long.

Slacker Radio and Pandora offer to the casual fans a direct pipeline into the songs they like to hear without a strong commitment to any one artist. The question,as has become so apparent as The Internet Age drives forward, is whether a site like Slacker Radio is as good for the labels as it is for the casual music fan.

No Slacker When It Comes to Content

Last week Pandora announced it was adding comedy content to its site's catalog. Slacker already has that and more. ABC news is a partner with Slacker and soon ESPN Sports content will be available as well. The movement for every Internet radio service seems to be towards the model first introduced by Satellite Radio providers like Sirius and XM.

A "one-stop shop" approach for Internet Radio stations, coupled with the ability to make their services into apps that can run on smart phones and other devices with Internet connectivity are another motivating factor for customers. The more content a streaming radio site can provide, the more attractive they become to their potential subscribers. Unlike cloud services, the listener can stream content from any artist the site carries, and it's not dependent on purchasing tracks to stream them.