Slacker: Latest Net Music Twist

Dennis Mudd, the ultra-cool entrepreneur behind Musicmatch, came by to show off his latest creation, called Slacker. Though it strikes me as a challenging sell because it pushes people to think differently about how they consume music.

Slacker, in full, is something of a cross between Pandora and the iPod. Pandora is an Internet music service that lets users pick some favorite artists or songs, and then the service generates a radio station of music that's right in the same ballpark as those choices. So you get some of your favorite music and some songs that are similar to your favorites, but perhaps by artists you never heard of.

Pandora and other Internet radio services are taking off in popularity, Mudd points out, but they have a limitation: you can't carry them around. "You're stuck needing a laptop and an Internet connection," he says. Kind of a problem at the beach.

The iPod and its ilk have a different limitation: A lot of people are too lazy to load them up and continually update playlists. (Anecdotally, I know many adults who've never again plugged their iPods into their PCs after initially loading all their favorite CDs.) So Slacker is selling an iPod-like device that can pull down music via satellite, store it, and constantly recreate playlists a la Pandora.

To put it together, Slacker users would go to the Slacker site, set up their own Pandora-like radio stations, and get those stations beamed into the Slacker devices.

Mudd is pitching this as an iPod replacement for the lazy set -- hence the name Slacker, btw. Long-term, he wants to license the technology to the likes of Sony or Nokia, so they can build it into PDAs, cell phones or their own music players.

Slacker is chock full of talent from the Net music world, including former Musicmatch CFO Gary Acord, former Rio CEO Jim Cady, and former iriver America CEO Jonathan Sasse.

(Photo: Noah Berger/Bloomberg News)