Internet radio service Slacker isn’t slacking anymore, thanks to the BlackBerry.
When Research In Motion decided to make its BlackBerry phones less corporate and more entertainment-oriented, it tapped Slacker as its first music app, over powerhouse rival Pandora.
The explosive growth of mobile has paid off handsomely for Slacker, which originally tried marketing its own portable media player, the $199 Slacker G2, with little success. About 35 percent of new Slacker registrants each day are BlackBerry owners. Slacker has 10 million listeners, up from 6 million when it launched with BlackBerry in January.
“We’re in a place where we thought we would be, but not necessarily on the platform where we thought we’d be,” Slacker CEO Jim Cady says.
Slacker is also available for the iPhone but is way more popular with the BlackBerry crowd, which now also can get Pandora.
Like Pandora, Slacker lets music fans “create” their own stations by typing in the names of artists they like. Slacker’s twist: It also offers DJ-programmed “genre” stations (rock, country, jazz, blues, etc.) and a bigger music library (nearly 3 million songs vs. 700,000 for Pandora).
And BlackBerry users can store the stations on a memory card, so they can listen in places with no wireless coverage (such as airplanes), save on battery power and listen to music while answering e-mail.
For years, rivals to Apple’s dominant iTunes have tried to gain a foothold with various forms of on-demand music programs.
Music subscription services such as Rhapsody and Napster tout unlimited access to millions of songs on demand. Satellite radio offers more music choices for monthly fees. Neither has caught on in a big way, while online radio has now come of age thanks to mobile.
“Our world has completely changed because of mobile,” Pandora founder Tim Westergren says. “It’s just gone berserk.”
Pandora, with 35 million listeners and nine…