Slacker Radio

This service rocks. It’s free, has a pretty good range of music, and is guaranteed to make me buy more music (on CD, because all electronic music download services are still either illegal or stupid).

The Flash player kicks butt (there’s a desktop one coming soon), and intelligently hooks into the webpage’s markup to update the title with every new song. It’s gold. Song Title by Artist from Album Name. It says Album Name! I’m sitting here scribbling down must-acquire ’90s music.

It uses AAC2+ apparently… all I really know is that it sounds great and is stupidly easy to use.

Brilliant.

But possibly unsustainable… none of my money is going to them. They’re launching hardware devices, so this might just be a ploy to get people to buy them, but I’m more interested in who’s doing all the work. There’s absolutely zero crowd-sourcing going on here that I can see… which means that “Related Artists” list is all professionally programmed. I know the Top Stations are, but the artists bit is going a little far perhaps…

Triple J Unearthed and Myspace and PureVolume, etc., all do it the other way around, which seems infinitely more sensible… but you need critical mass to get there, I suppose.

One to watch. And listen to.