US personal radio service Slacker is getting a high-profile relaunch this week, with an emphasis on human curation, including some well-known YouTubers. The site and its iPhone app have been redesigned to look cleaner and more modern, with Android following shortly. But, like numerous other streaming services, Slacker is also trying to find the right blend of algorithmic and human curation for its stations. “Our next natural evolution is to broaden and dial up the authentic human touch by inviting more and more relevant, creative and celebrated voices to Slacker,” as CEO Duncan Orrell-Jones put it. For now, that means YouTubers rather than traditional music artists: Tyler Oakley, Rooster teeth, Comic Book Girl and Nerdist are the first to launch their own-branded stations on Slacker, sitting alongside its existing playlists. “Pandora is perfectly good background music, but I’m more engaged by programming that comes with personality,” Orrell-Jones told the LA Times. “We want to double-down on human personality, so we went searching for the modern Howard Stern.”
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Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…