Slacker Radio And ESPN Team-Up To Bring Personalized Sports Stations
September 20, 2011
Slacker Radio, an online streaming music service, just announced its partnership with ESPN to provide a personalized, all sports listening experience.
Slacker is similar to other streaming services such as Pandora, where users can create stations and listen to certain types of music, based on an artist or genre. However, Slacker is moving towards being more of a radio service instead of just music, as they are pursuing partnerships with companies like ESPN and ABC News along with offering a comedy channel.
ESPN will be a popular move for Slacker, as it will provide sports content where listeners can tune in 24 hours a day. Users can listen to shows like "Mike in the Morning," "The Scott Van Pelt Show," "SportsCenter" and other programs ESPN offers.
Slacker provides a basic free version of their service along with premium and plus subscriptions. The free version allows the listener to access the programs that are on the ESPN station, but you are stuck with the current programming.
The premium and plus subscriptions allow for a more personalized, ad-free experience with myESPN Radio. Listeners can set up customized radio stations based on their favorite teams, sports or ESPN programs. Users can skip certain shows and optionally add hourly SportsCenter updates to any other Slacker stations.
Currently, the plus subscription to Slacker is $3.99 per month and the premium version is $9.99. You can access all of the details about their subscriptions and what is included on their website.
This seems like a smart move for Slacker Radio, as listeners may be more willing to subscribe in order to have access to the customizable sports content. It also seems more reasonable than putting up with ads in the free version. Let us know what you think, is this enough to encourage you to subscribe to a premium music service?
