Why Slacker Radio fails as an iPhone App

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Sat Oct 10, 2009 6:05 pm

AT&T, Comcast and others took two billion dollars from the US Government to upgrade the Internet connectivity of the United States, and pocketed the cash. That every executive hasn't been executed for mass treason is beyond me. As a result, we still have some of the poorest wireless coverage in the world.

Slacker Radio is an iPhone app that streams music to your phone. It has been doing a good job finding songs I actually like to listen to, as opposed to Last.fm and Pandora, which keep giving me fucking The Academy Is, Good Charlotte and Dashboard Confessional pieces.

The Slacker Radio app wants you to give them money. I will not give them money. One of the ways they encourage you to give them money is to cripple their free app. You're not getting features in the pay-for app, you're getting the dumb restrictions lifted off the free one. This model will never work.

When there is poor wireless strength, a pop-up, er, pops up and says, "Hey, we can't get a signal, to try again, skip to the next song."

You are allowed to skip songs on this app no more than six times per hour.

...

... As a result of those two things, I would need to wait 45 minutes or something to use this app again.

Holy Fucking Christ, everyone who works on the Internet or for the Internet is a goddamn unblinking retard.

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 8:46 am

Obviously you're the retarded one. Like Pandora, you can continue using the app when you reach your limit of skips; just select another station or stay in the same station listening to the songs until you can skip again. For that and other reasons, I subscribed to their Slacker Plus. So, I guess their model is working. :)~

Save the Batteries · Post by **Save the Batteries** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 5:43 pm

Just pirate the songs you like and load onto your iphone

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 10:20 pm

Anonymous wrote:Obviously you're the retarded one.

I subscribed to their Slacker Plus. So, I guess their model is working.

Guy paying for music over the Internet is quick to call others retarded. Fantastic. Anyway, you can't read (it wants you to skip if you run into a brief network glitch, but you can't if you've run out of skips. Obviously the solution is to handle network issues in a different manner than using the skip method) so I'm sure all this will eventually look like gobbledey gook to you, but I should say that they do the best job of anyone presenting related music in a genre and lbh'er n snttbg.

Ice Cream Jonsey · Post by **Ice Cream Jonsey** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 10:22 pm

Save the Batteries wrote:Just pirate the songs you like and load onto your iphone

Well... yes. But I like the concept of radio, in that I'll be listening up to six hours a day, and eventually whatever I have downloaded is going to get stale.

Anyway, it's a fine app. If I were to pay for a service like that, it'd be theirs.