The $3.99 tier of Slacker just gives you the ability to stream a radio station with unlimited skips and no ads on the station or in the app (or website). It does not allow you to download anything for offline listening and it doesn't allow you to listen to any song on demand, as noted by Bruins_CCb_4. For pure radio stations, slacker is superior (for now) because you can fine tune your station by adding artists, choosing the amount of new music that is played, and how much the station can roam from the seeded artists or songs. Apple has never had that much customization in stations and has actually lost the customization they did offer with radio with Apple Music. For now you can only choose a prebuilt radio station or a station based on a song or artist, but you can't customize from there beyond marking a song as play more like this or less like this.
Apple music doesn't offer a comparable tier to the 3.99 tier of Slacker. Apple Music is comparable to Spotify, Rdio, and Slacker $9.99 tiers. I personally find Slacker to be the worst choice at the $9.99 price point. I tried the premium tier and quickly went running back to Google Play Music All Access. It is poorly organized and difficult to get to music in your library. Slacker is built around radio, not building a music library. For the unlimited streaming and download service at the $9.99 price point, you are better off with Spotify, Rdio, Google Music, Apple Music, etc. For ad-free radio, at the $4 price point, I think Slacker is the best.
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