UPDATED 14:28 EDT / JUNE 17 2011

Slacker Radio iPad Launch Heightens Mobile Music Wars

Competition between streaming music services are becoming pretty stiff as far as choices go.   I use Pandora as my choice between desktop, iPhone, and iPad. Now that Slacker as launched an iPad app,  I’m curious again.

Hot on the heels of rival Pandora’s IPO yesterday, Slacker Radio has its own offering for the public: an iPad app. The app brings all three levels of Slacker service to the iPad – Slacker Basic Radio, the ad-free Slacker Radio Plus, and Slacker Premium, which offers music on-demand.

Of course, listening to music on the iPad app isn’t too different from listening to music on Slacker’siPhone app, but the iPad’s larger screen definitely makes browsing through artist bios, album reviews, artist pics and album art a much more pleasant experience.

A new feature also made its way onto both the iPad and iPhone versions of the app. From now on, you’ll be able to create Pandora-esque custom stations by choosing multiple songs or artists. Plus, Slacker promises to bring ESPN Radio content to the mix soon. The Slacker Radio iPad app is available now as a free download from the Apple App Store.

Pandora retains it’s users pretty well,  but depending on which service can offer the most customizable ways of listening to music will win the battle.  Sometimes Pandora stations can become super repetitive and lacks variety.

Slacker’s promise to deliver on ESPN Radio will bring over a huge amount of sports fanatics.  Pandora doesn’t currently offer genre’s specifically outside the realm of music.  This could leverage Slacker to a generation that enjoys listening to other sports coverage while attending a game.

If neither suit your fancy, there’s always Grooveshark.  One of the main complaints is having user uploaded content affect the quality of song rotation. One song being 192kbps and the next 128kbps and so forth.

After giving it a try,  I’ve decided that Pandora is still my choice.  Whilst, the web interface isn’t appealing,  there are many third party applications that make the Pandora experience seamless such as LastPandora which scrobbles music to Last.fm.


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