Rumor: Slacker Radio preparing on-demand music service

Slacker Radio, one of the many online and mobile options for radio, is rumored to be adding on-demand music playback to their service. The Pandora, Last.fm, and let’s not forget regular radio competitor will soon be taking on a whole new force in Rhapsody, Spotify, and Napster by allowing users to choose what songs they want to play, when they want to play them.

Slacker Radio has almost been cast in a shadow by the wildly popular Pandora and even Last.fm. But users will actually be stunned to find that they have more playback control than Pandora provides, including the ability to request a specific song to play down the line. With the addition of an On-Demand subscription service, Slacker will become a one-stop shop for music playback on the web.

However, this does not come without backlash. On-demand music has had a tough time bringing in profit as unlimited music streaming is not greeted enthusiastically by record labels. Rhapsody and Napster both allow 25 free songs per month per user. However those services lose a tremendous amount of profit because of it (nearly $0.25 per user per month).

In my opinion Slacker is trying to tie together radio and personal collections of music like no other service has done before. And they might very well succeed.

Read [Wired]