Slacker Personal Radio
If you love music, any kind of music, then you should check out Slacker. Slacker Personal Radio is free personalized radio with millions of songs from thousands of artists from around the world. For a few dollars a month, you can even lose the few ads, have complete song lyrics and unlimited skips, and their Slacker G2 portable mini player.
The site is very easy to navigate, and is organized into stations. There is a wide range of preprogrammed stations to choose from, including a Slacker’s Spotlight Station and the Top Stations that others are listening to, or you can program your own custom station. While you are listening to a station, you can explore a clickable playlist for the station, and a clickable listing of the artists included on the station, and related artists. It’s so easy to go off clicking and exploring, and end up listening to something completely amazing and unexpected. While the music is playing, you can view a biography of the artist, the album’s cover art, and song lyrics. Slacker also remembers what you have recently played.
There are many active forums, where users can share musical discoveries or their custom stations with each other, or chat about the various preprogrammed stations. Requests can be made here for additional new artists or stations to be included.
And, you can take it everywhere with Slacker’s mobile application, either on your Blackberry Smartphone, IPhone or IPod, or the Slacker G2 device. CNet called Slacker Personal Radio “Best. Streaming music app. Ever.”
I listened to Bluegrass music and Comedy, discovered the incredible John Lee Hooker and Cristina Branco, and remembered how much I liked Christina Aguilera and Antonin Dvorak.
A word of warning though: it’s too easy to spend hours looking through all of the great music, finding new favorites. Also, it’s not really designed to listen to song after song by the same artist, but to listen to different artists across a musical genre, much like what you would hear listening to a traditional radio station. I often keep it playing in the background while I work on something else.
