In February, 2008 I proposed that music players should have thumbs up/down button to instantly tune your preferences for streaming music on services like Pandora. The Slacker G2
(They were probably working on this when I published my article, but I’ll take credit anyway.)
Isn’t it about time your portable player had Heart and Ban buttons on it for personalizing customized radio stations that update with a single click via WiFi? We thought so.
I think so too!
There are several other interesting variants of the Heart/Ban or Thumbs Up/Down concept back in my original posting that the Slacker design doesn’t represent, so check it out.
It’s great to see so much innovation happening in the digital music space. The one thing I crave is higher fidelity streaming stations. It wasn’t until I dusted off the turntable I used to DJ with, and dropped the needle into the grooves of a 25-year-old album that I realized what I had been missing. After listening to MP3′s and 128k-160kbps streaming audio for so long, I had forgotten how much better music can sound.
So here is a follow-up idea to steal: for $4 per month (what Slacker charges for the ad-free version of its service) raise the audio fidelity that will make my ears and my hifi happy.
