Slacker Radio iPhone App Available in Canada

Remember the days when listening to music involved vinyl records? Mix cassette tapes created by recording the radio? Or what about CDs and popping them into your “DiscMan?” Physical album art with lyrics? What’s that?!

Anyways, the future of music is now the streaming kind, and today Slacker Radio officially announced the availability of their free iPhone app in Canada (the USA app was released on Jan. 14th). What makes Slacker Radio great is their vast library which consists of millions of songs by thousands of artists.

Here’s a press release with more info:

Slacker Personal Radio enables Canadian music lovers to create their own custom stations or listen to and personalize over 60 expert-programmed genre stations. They can also read artist bios and album reviews, while viewing artist images and album art. Users don’t have to worry about managing playlists, researching new artists or transferring their music collection from their home computers — just click play to start enjoying your favorite music today.

Canadian music fans will have access to the free Slacker Basic Radio for up to 30 days. After 30 days, they can upgrade to Slacker Radio Plus, featuring all the same great benefits of Slacker Basic Radio along with station caching for supported mobile devices, ad-free listening, complete song lyrics*, unlimited song skipping, song requests and more. Station caching enables mobile listeners to store their personal stations on selected smartphones for listening anywhere, anytime, uninterrupted.

Listeners can store a station by simply selecting “Cache Station” from within the supported app. The station can then be downloaded via Wi-Fi, over USB or through the cellular network. Cached stations are stored on the smartphone and can be accessed on planes, subways and everywhere in between requiring minimal battery usage and eliminating the need to access the mobile carrier network to play music.

“Turning Canada on to personal radio has been some time in the making, and we are proud to unveil our Canadian Slacker Radio experience,” said Jonathan Sasse, senior vice president of marketing at Slacker. “Whether it’s from the web or a smartphone, Slacker takes the work out of listening to your favorite music wherever you want.”

Slacker Personal Radio is the first and only personal radio service available for Canadian listeners. Slacker has agreements in place with key content owners providing listeners in Canada with a deep catalog of music for Slacker genre stations along with their own custom created stations.

The app is only free for the first 30 days, then after that you will have to upgrade to Slacker Plus for $3.99USD, which includes…

Slacker Radio Plus:
— Cache stations to BlackBerry and Android smartphones; soon on
iPhone/iPod touch
— Enjoy Slacker music even without a wireless network on select mobile
applications
— Unlimited song skipping
— Ad-free listening
— Complete song lyrics*
— Create custom stations based on artists or songs
— Unlimited song requests for creating perfect custom stations
— High-quality stereo playback
— Over 60 professionally programmed genre stations
— Fine tune stations on-the-fly to play more of the music you like
— View artist biographies and photos
— View album art and reviews
— “Peek Ahead” artist and album preview
— Pause and skip songs
— Rate songs as favorites
— Ban the songs and artists you don’t like
— Downloadable “mini” player for your PC

I tested Slacker Radio on my iPhone and it worked amazingly well and had a pretty good selection of music. Coupled with Backgrounder, this will be a fantastic solution to listen to music anywhere. Personally, if you have a US iTunes account (free), you should be checking out AOL Radio AOL Radio in Canada can be found under CBS Radio in Canada (thanks Lee for the tip!). Don’t forget other notable iPhone radio apps like Corus Radio, CBC Radio, Astral Radio, and FlyCast, and Last.FM.

Is online streaming music the way of the future? Having a cached station on your iPhone would be pretty cool, if you are up for paying the monthly subscription.

Click here to download Slacker Radio.

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