I’ve been listening to Slacker the last several days and have been quite impressed. No, I’m not talking about being a slacker. I’m talking about the online music player called Slacker. It uses Flash to stream the music to your computer through a web browser.

The coolest feature that I see right now is the ability to enter an artist’s name and then the player will play that artist’s songs as well as other artists that it thinks are similar. You can skip songs (up to a certain number an hour) if/when you get to ones you don’t like, and the quality seems to be pretty good via my Bose headphones.

Check out the screenshot below to see all the artists and songs that were played for me when I entered in Switchfoot:

It’s definitely worth checking out. Also notable is that they’re apparently going to come out with a portable player with built-in Wi-Fi — something to compete with an Apple iPod or a Microsoft Zune (for those of you what the latter actually is). I’d be curious to see just how well that device will integrate with their streaming music service.

My guess is that while the music is free for right now, they’ll be adding in ads pretty soon. I do know that they will offer a paid, ad-free version, but hopefully the advertisements won’t be too intrusive. Even if you can’t stand the adverts whenever they do show up, another product this new company apparently will offer is a satellite-hookup for your car, so maybe this will be a competitor to XM and SIRIUS satellite radio as well? Sounds pretty ambitious to me.

My advice is to enjoy the service for now whilst you can get it without ads. I wouldn’t hedge any bets with the internet player, simply because their costs are likely going to go way upw soon.