June 29, 2011
In about five weeks Slacker Radio will be the primary music provider for AOL Radio. On June 14th President of CBS Interactive David Goodman told his team the company decided not to renew its arrangement to provide music to AOL. With the aggressive approach CBS was taking with digital and with Last.fm integrated into the radio.com player CBS decided to go it alone. AOL loses great CBS brands like WFAN and WCBS in New York, WIP in Philly and KCBS in San Francisco but picks up ESPN and News from ABC radio. Once the love affair ended between AOL and CBS, AOL reached out to Slacker and cut the deal annuonced yesterday.
AOL is not only touting its new relationship with Slacker, it's really playing up fewer commercials. On its website AOL says "We have heard you loud and clear - the new AOL Radio player will feature less commercials. Also, listeners who subscribe to the Radio Plus or Premium Radio products will get ad-free AOL Radio as part of their benefits." Slacker will provide access to ad-free radio and enable users to create tailored radio stations, save favorite songs and stations, review station histories, and skip up to six songs per hour, per station.
Slacker CEO Jim Cady told Radio Ink, "One thing that the partnership brings is the ability for us to provide the AOL listener a much more compelling experience. The experiences they have had to date have been good, but not necessarily up to what people expect today. We really look forward to working with them and providing a much more personalized service as well as tiers of service, to their listener base. The new service will deliver three product tiers to users: free AOL Radio with personalization and customization by Slacker, ad-free and feature-rich Slacker Radio Plus and on-demand access with Slacker Premium Radio.
As far as listeners go, this is a big win for Slacker. The arrangement with AOL Radio will double the number of listeners Slacker currently has. The partnership will enable Slacker to deliver its new radio offerings to a larger audience, allow AOL Radio and Slacker to develop new advertising opportunities for clients and integrate AOL Music?s original editorial voice across all its services. Upon the launch of the new AOL Radio player, Slacker will lead advertising sales within the player, enabling AOL to package a portion of the inventory for premium AOL Music integrated sponsorships
As far as Slacker goes, while the AOL brand is not what it once was it is still big. This should help Slacker nudge its way onto the headlines a little more than the media darling, Pandora. Cady says step two is getting those new
listeners to become subscribers and ramping up the advertising. "There are a couple of things that are critically important to us. One is this increases our overall audience. We feel very comfortable that the business model we have works quite well, both from an ad supported perspective as well as moving into a couple of subscription tiers. The biggest thing we are focused on now is we?re putting more people into the top of the funnel, so to speak. I think that is a key element for this. In addition, I think it will dramatically increase our overall ad footprint and advertising exposure and allow us to be able to do some more interesting things with more advertisers because of the much bigger footprint that we will have." Cady says right now you can never really be happy with revenue but advertising is a gross margin positive for Slacker. "It?s really about providing that service, but moving people into the paid tiers is doing well. It?s getting better and better on a monthly basis."
(6/29/2011 5:13:23 PM)
Congrats to Slacker and Pandora, as the flawed, fradulent, destructive HD Radio fades into litigation! LMAO!!!
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