Slacker Radio and ESPN team up for personalized sports stations and updates

Slacker Radio on Tuesday announced it has teamed up with ESPN Audio to create user-customized sports stations, just in time to appreciate the beginning of the NFL football season and the start of post-season MLB baseball.

Streaming music services have been making quite a few headlines as of late with the hyped U.S. launch of Spotify, MOG and Rdio offering free versions, and the upcoming launch of a Facebook music service. But one thing often missing from these streaming services is content dedicated to U.S. sports fans.

Users of the free Slacker Basic Radio service now have access an interactive, programmed ESPN station, while Slacker Radio Plus and Slacker Premium Radio subscribers get extra goodies. Those extras include an ad-free general ESPN station and the ability to create personalized stations “based on favorite sports, teams or ESPN programs.” Paid subscribers also get the ability to turn on hourly SportsCenter updates that can be inserted into any of genre-based or custom Slacker station.

The new sports service claims to offer dedicated coverage of “all major sporting events and top news stories on both a local and national level,” while also offering up sports talk programs including Mike and Mike in the Morning and The Herd with Colin Cowherd.

Unfortunately, to get the most out of the service you have to be a Slacker Radio Plus and Slacker Premium Radio subscriber. Slacker Radio Plus runs $3.99 a month and Slacker Premium Radio runs $9.99 a month. Slacker Premium Radio is a recently launched on-demand offering that provides access to a catalog of eight million songs.

What do you think of Slacker Radio? Are you interested in premium sports radio content or is $3.99 too much?