Slacker Premium: What would you be willing to pay for Premium?

[fseir]

Just curious what other Tesla owners would be willing to pay for a premium Slacker account? In spite of its limitations, it would certainly be nice to have the full Tesla integration, but I’m not willing to pay full price for the upgrade, since I already pay for other premium music services. I might be willing to pay $3.99/mo, but that’s probably my limit.

Maybe if we can show Slacker some data, they would consider offering a Tesla owner discount, which could potentially net them a lot of premium subscribers and lessen the call for Tesla to drop Slacker altogether?

Full disclosure: short of a discount, I’m definitely in the camp hoping for Tesla to change providers to anything other than Slacker!

 

[nexusone]

Zero. Slacker is garbage. You know what people would pay for? Spotify.

 

[fseir]

Zero. Slacker is garbage. You know what people would pay for? Spotify.

I would LOVE Spotify, but aside from Europe and rumors, I haven’t seen anything concrete to suggest it’s coming anytime soon. Slacker is far from ideal, but premium is at least worth a few bucks/mo, IMO.

 

[ewoodrick]

Why would Slacker give a discount?

 

[KenF]

On a Tesla, Slacker premium provides the same low fidelity 64kbps audio as the free service. Slacker would have to offer 256kbps AAC on a Tesla before I would pay anything.

 

[Gavyne]

Waiting for Tesla to change to anything else other than Slacker. They already use Spotify for EU models. I think it's only a matter of time before their contract with Slacker runs out and they switch here in US. At least that's what we're all waiting for.

 

[run-the-joules]

I pay $25/yr for slacker plus. Premium doesn't seem to offer anything I care about above and beyond what Plus gives me.

I don't give half a crap about Spotify unlike most people, it seems. All I want is a better way to listen to Audible.com audiobooks than streaming them from my phone manually. A native client in the car or carplay would be nice.

 

[voip-ninja]

I won’t pay a nickel for slacker but they could extract some $$ from my wallet if they offered subscriptions to Spotify or Apple Music or any streaming service that didn’t blow.

 

[Snow Drift]

I pay for Slacker Premium. So far I like the service, ability to skip songs, make stations, the quality and the mobile app for listening to offline content on my train ride to work. I mostly prefer to listen to real stations with curated content, so a radio station basically. Slacker is very similar to SiriusXM for normal content.

 

[fseir]

Why would Slacker give a discount?

Because they have an opportunity to lock in several hundred thousand subscribers, and potentially avoid what looks like inevitable irrelevance. If it weren’t for Tesla, I wouldn’t even know who Slacker is, and based on these comments and early poll results, most of us would eagerly jump ship at the first chance. So Slacker is foolish to not offer a “Tesla Premium” tier, and at least attempt to build its subscriber base.

Also, it may only be 64kbps, but it sounds better than streaming audio over Bluetooth, so until Tesla offers an alternate streaming choice or higher bitrate (which they may never do for those of us with free LTE connections), I can live with discounted 64kbps audio.

It looks like the “Nevers” are winning, so far, but I’d be willing to bet that a 30-day free trial, and then $3.99/mo after, might convince a few of you to give it a shot?

 

[Knightshade]

Also, it may only be 64kbps, but it sounds better than streaming audio over Bluetooth

It shouldn't, unless the source material on your phone is also low-quality.

And playing 320kb or FLAC from a key sounds better than either and is free.

It looks like the “Nevers” are winning, so far, but I’d be willing to bet that a 30-day free trial, and then $3.99/mo after, might convince a few of you to give it a shot?

If Tesla updated their app to support 320kb then I'd give it a shot at $3.99. But since that would actually cost Tesla considerable money (in bandwidth) they're obviously not going to.

At 64kb I wouldn't pay anything for it.

 

[Cpiguy]

I signed up for Premium thinking it would give a much better experience. After signing up and creating the Premium account, I logged in and didn't notice any difference what-so-ever. I called Slacker and they explained that there is no difference when you have Premium. They explained that all Tesla's come with a Premium Slacker account. What garbage!

I'd take Apple Music, Spotify, Pandora, anything other than Slacker. I also miss Sirius. I use SAT in all my cars. Lost all the music and news channels I've been listen to for years.

 

[fseir]

I signed up for Premium thinking it would give a much better experience. After signing up and creating the Premium account, I logged in and didn't notice any difference what-so-ever. I called Slacker and they explained that there is no difference when you have Premium. They explained that all Tesla's come with a Premium Slacker account. What garbage!

I'd take Apple Music, Spotify, Pandora, anything other than Slacker. I also miss Sirius. I use SAT in all my cars. Lost all the music and news channels I've been listen to for years.

According to this thread, Slacker reps are totally clueless when it comes to Tesla:

Slacker Radio Premium experience

The premium account definitely has some differences, including the ability to create playlists (on another device), and repeat songs as long as they are in a playlist, or ones that you've found through the search function. Apparently, even with premium, the voice requests will only play a particular song one time, and then there is the standard time out, during which time, a subsequent voice request for the same song, will start a radio station based on that song.

 

[DrDabbles]

Just use your mobile phone with your music app of choice over high quality BT, and turn the music quality to the highest setting. Google Play allows me to cache music on my device in "high quality", and I have to assume Apple Music does the same.

 

[Knightshade]

Just use your mobile phone with your music app of choice over high quality BT, and turn the music quality to the highest setting. Google Play allows me to cache music on my device in "high quality", and I have to assume Apple Music does the same.

Not everyone has unlimited data these days... (nor do they love the idea of paying for it just because their CarOfTheFuture offers crap music options otherwise)

 

[Xenoilphobe]

Slacker sucks from a sonic fidelity standpoint and from the limited library. Spotify Premium is way better. Slack audio quality is as a bad as XM, unless you just listen to crappy talk radio and sportscasts.

We cancelled our Slacker accounts years ago when Spotify ran circles around them in content and audio quality. My whole family made the migration to Spotify....

 

[Atari2600]

I have Apple Music Family and have no plans on switching. Slacker doesn't seem that bad it's just not for me as I'm a hard core Apple family setup which includes my children and my parents.

 

[voip-ninja]

Just use your mobile phone with your music app of choice over high quality BT, and turn the music quality to the highest setting. Google Play allows me to cache music on my device in "high quality", and I have to assume Apple Music does the same.

A lot of us don't want to poke at the tiny phone screen when we're driving and we decide we want to listen to something else... especially when we're driving a car with an iPad Pro sized tablet sitting inches from our face that should be able to do the job of handling content easily.

 

[DrDabbles]

Not everyone has unlimited data these days... (nor do they love the idea of paying for it just because their CarOfTheFuture offers crap music options otherwise)

That's why I mentioned the cached music option so you don't eat through your data plan. You download music on wifi (by default my phone only downloaded on wifi), and play even when there's no service.

If you don't want to pay for music, there's still an FM tuner with an "HD" receiver, so I really don't see anybody being forced to pay for unlimited data or a terrible (censored) streaming service.

A lot of us don't want to poke at the tiny phone screen when we're driving and we decide we want to listen to something else... especially when we're driving a car with an iPad Pro sized tablet sitting inches from our face that should be able to do the job of handling content easily.

My phone does voice control pretty well. I think Siri can handle playing music too. So just like when I want to send a text message, I just tell my phone what I want it to do. No touching screens. The screen in front of you offers several choices, which are no doubt selected based on licensing terms. If you want spotify, you should probably petition spotify to work with Tesla on license fees and terms. If you don't want streaming media because the quality is awful, put your music on a thumbdrive. Otherwise there's still terrestrial radio. You've got quite a few options there, I'm not really sure what the complaint is.

 

[voip-ninja]

That's why I mentioned the cached music option so you don't eat through your data plan. You download music on wifi (by default my phone only downloaded on wifi), and play even when there's no service.

If you don't want to pay for music, there's still an FM tuner with an "HD" receiver, so I really don't see anybody being forced to pay for unlimited data or a terrible (censored) streaming service.



My phone does voice control pretty well. I think Siri can handle playing music too. So just like when I want to send a text message, I just tell my phone what I want it to do. No touching screens. The screen in front of you offers several choices, which are no doubt selected based on licensing terms. If you want spotify, you should probably petition spotify to work with Tesla on license fees and terms. If you don't want streaming media because the quality is awful, put your music on a thumbdrive. Otherwise there's still terrestrial radio. You've got quite a few options there, I'm not really sure what the complaint is.

The complaint is lack of choices for streaming and your solution of using the phone to solve the problem doesn't cut it for many of us. Another factor is that some want to leverage the "unlimited" data plan on the car and not chew up their data plan streaming music.

I don't think a handful of cranky customers approaching a company like Spotify does anything to solve this, it takes complaining to Tesla since it's like Elon personally inked the deal with Slacker that has them exclusive on Tesla vehicles for apparently more than 5 years.