via Tech Crunch, a good overview of the coming MOG All Access music subscription service. full disclosure, I know and have worked with the founder. <object width="853" height="505"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/pnHDvPmLIcg&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/pnHDvPmLIcg&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="853" height="505"></embed></object> --- MOG has set a launch date for its All Access music streaming service: December 2. That’s when you’ll be able to sign up for the hands down best music streaming service on the web. If you’re willing to pay $5/month, that is. Is it worth it? I’m definitely starting to think so. Partially because of the quality of the product (more on that below), and partially because the free streaming music business model seems to be falling apart. Spotify is delaying U.S. launch, MySpace may move to a subscription service, and the iMeem service, recently acquired by MySpace, may not even be around for much longer. By this time next year there may not be any legal free streaming services left. But even with free streaming competitors, MOG may be worth it. I’ve been testing the service for a couple of weeks and it is a significantly better user experience than any other music service I’ve tried, including Spotify, MySpace Music and Pandora. It’s just incredibly easy to search for and discover music, add it to playlists or your library, and start listening. You can see from the video how easy it is to search for artists, albums or songs, and add them to your library or to playlists. Based on this alone MOG is better than MySpace Music, which continues to try to slow down users – the more songs they stream, the more MySpace has to pay. MOG doesn’t have that problem because they pay the labels a set fee per user every month. But MOG also has another killer feature – MOG Radio. The video shows how it works. Type in any artist and start to listen to songs just from that artist. use the slider to add in more similar artists. Move it all the way to the right and you basically have Pandora. But the ability to just listen to music from one artist is a really compelling product. I’d consider paying $5/month just for this feature alone. I also like MOG’s social features. You can search for playlists created by other users, or go to user profile pages to see what music they’ve been listening to. If you like their taste, you can follow them and get updates on new music they are playing. You can see all of these features in the overview video embedded above. Watch that video and then decide: would you pay $5/month for MOG All Access? Let us know in the comments.
i guess the question is whether the superior experience is worth the price of one mocha latte a month?
Their library is more important to me than anything else. I'd pay $5 for that, and then drop subscription as soon as they do something funny, like if a song is 'no longer available'. The superior experience is worthless to me. Though they have some neat ideas. reminds me of grooveshark.
Pandora is no where near feature competitive, plus the Pandora library is far more limited, only about 800k songs if IRC. MOG's got all the majors, major independents, on a par w/ Rhapsody, etc. (although probably not iTunes). I'm waiting to see what the bit rate is, but if it's at least 192k, or higher, it could replace Pandora pretty easily. I paid for the higher bit rate Pandora, and it really does not sound that great, even at 320k. SiriusXM (SeXimus?) over IP sounds better, and that's just 128k.
the service launched today- here's an overview from TechCrunch, which says: All Access is a nearly flawless product that is an absolute joy to use.
Based on that video, I would be willing to pay $5 a month for that. If the library is as big as they say (and I do listen to some stuff that most people would consider obscure so I would need to see how extensive it really is first) then it is absolutely worth it for those features. I love Pandora Radio, but when I am listening to my playlist sometimes it will throw in artists that I didn't know about and I really enjoy the song. But it is not an easy thing to then go and listen to more of that artist's music because you don't really have the freedom that this MOG is promising. There's also the issue of my work blocking this domain. They have blocked a lot of different streaming websites, but they haven't yet blocked Pandora. If they blocked this one, it wouldn't be worth it to me because I wouldn't listen to this at home.
I would never pay to listen to music. Are we talking about listening? Listening? Listening. We are talking about listening to music. I got the internets, the radio, my computer, cable tv, records and cds, and you're talking about paying to listen to music? Listening. I can't believe people do this. You don't own any of it, right? You pay to listen to music? I'm just sayin'
Agreed, if they offer some sort of download or something for higher quality use, then this would be effective. Paying 5$ a month to listen to something and then paying again later to download/buy the album? Cmon mog.
it's a 320kb stream, much higher than other online streaming options, and near, but not quite, "CD" quality.
i would pay $5 a month for that, but how will they be able to keep the rate at $5 long-term? most other subscription-type sites are significantly higher. for example, i have been subscribing to rhapsody since it came out in like 2002. it was $7.99/month at first and i think its now $12.99/month. and i watched the video and i dont think these guys are offering anything any different than jambase/rhapsody does (create playlists, artist sampler, artist-based radio, cross-referencing w/ other artists). rhapsody literally has pretty much everything except the beatles and led zep. mainstream, indie, local bands...i can even find bands that i played on up there. since i work infront of a computer its great to have something like this. you can instantly pull up any album you can think of and listen to it there - and the audio quality has always been good too. it has been the single biggest asset in really opening me up to tons and tons of music that i would have overlooked - and not even w/ current bands so much, but 'rediscovering' older music. i would probably hold out for a few months to see if they can maintain their $5 a month and also to compare their library to rhapsody's. but since its pretty much the same thing, if it was cheaper of course i would use them.
$5/month sounds like a tempting enough price point. People do pay for radio. But for their sake, I hope their cash flow model is better then Sirus. Unless they're just fishing for VC money or a google buyout. There's a 'try free' option for those of you interested. But only if you're in the US
