Slacker on Tuesday unveiled Slacker Premium Radio, a new tier of the popular streaming audio service that gives music lovers on-demand access to the individual songs, albums, top charts, station playlists, and single-artist radio stations in the Slacker library.
The $9.99 per month Slacker Premium can be accessed via the Web, or apps available for the iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, Android, and BlackBerry platforms.
Slacker Premium Radio lets listeners search, play, and replay specific songs and entire albums from the 8 million songs in Slacker's library. In addition, users have the ability to create playlists and cache songs and albums for offline playback. Slacker Premium Radio also features all-new artist pages that contain artist biographies, all songs by the artist, discographies, and related artists.
A revamped Slacker station creator grants all listeners, regardless of account type, the ability to create multi-artist stations, with custom fine-tuning. Slacker Premium listeners, on the other hand, can create stations that will only play songs from a single chosen artist or band.
"Up until this point there has been an array of 'Internet radio' and 'on-demand' services with much debate about which is better from a content, experience, and technology perspective," said Jonathan Sasse, senior vice president of marketing at Slacker. "Slacker Premium Radio provides music lovers with the best of both. We believe the combination of a world class radio service providing music discovery up front with on-demand access to any song and entire albums is the winning combo."
Slacker Radio includes over 150 expert-programmed music stations, ABC News, comedy, artist-hosted showcase stations, and music festival stations. ESPN Sports content is coming soon.
For more, check out PCMag's Slacker iPad app review and the slideshow above.