AOL-Slacker Mashup Makes Sweet Music
AOL Huffington Post Media Group announced Tuesday that its online AOL Radio service, currently powered by CBS, would be replaced by San Diego-based Slacker Radio, almost doubling its listener base from 6 million to 11 million listeners through a new multi-year partnership.
“Both companies bring unique content and functionality to this new partnership,” said Slacker CEO Jim Cady. “We are thrilled to work with AOL Radio to continue to improve how music lovers experience radio.” The new service, to go into effect this summer, will have three tiers of service - the free, Basic service, ad-free Radio Plus, and a completely on-demand service, known as Slacker Premium.
AOL says the partnership will provider listeners an enhanced ability to personalize their experience, including saving favorite songs and stations, reading artist biographies and album reviews. Paid-for services will allow users to significantly increase the number of songs they can choose to skip over.
Slacker Radio is the perfect partner to significantly increase the quality of our offerings,” said AOL Radio head Lisa Namerow. AOL hopes, through music, to direct to and keep listeners on its recently acquired hot Internet media properties such as Huffington Post, TechCrunch and Engadget.
Radio broadcaster CBS has been increasingly driving listener traffic to its own online music properties including MP3.com, Last.fm and Pandora, both direct competitors to AOL Radio, so the new partnership makes sense.
AOL Radio will continue hosting its 250 music stations, all programmed by music experts, but will now include all of Slacker’s stations and offerings, including ESPN Radio and ABC News. Along with changes on the website, mobile users can expect a relaunch of AOL Radio’s iPhone app, which has been downloaded over 6 million times, to occur this summer, with Android and other platforms to see changes soon after.
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