I don’t really understand how this is considered to be a groundbreaking service. I consider myself to be a power listener to music, and I was really excited about this service given my dissatisfaction with Rhapsody. However, I found quickly that all the hype is just hype.

While amusing, the artist radio slider feature seems a bit pointless: do I really want to specifically listen to a station that’s 18.5% one artist with similar artists filling in the rest? Don’t get me wrong, I like to have that option, but I would definitely also like the option to specify additional artists in the mix (ala Pandora).

Even with an automatic way of presenting me music that I may enjoy, with the amount of music I listen to and rate, I need to be able to quickly generate a list of songs that I already know that I like within a certain genre/mood. Mog does not provide this. The service does offer a 1-5 star rating system buried in the detail pages of the tracks, but there’s no way to view or set that rating from the player. Even if there were, I can’t create an automatic playlist that will give me all rock songs rated 4-5 stars.

The lack of song tagging is common between Mog and Rhapsody, but I can kind of get around that in both by adding songs to playlists. In Rhapsody, there’s an arbitrary limit of 800 songs per playlist, but that can be worked around by creating multiple playlists and stitching them together using an auto playlist. Though I haven’t tested the capacities of Mogs playlist feature, it’s clear that they consider it in term of a “mix tape” suggesting that users keep them between 30-60 minutes long.

Whereas Rhapody’s interface feels like a cheap, awkward knock-off of iTunes, Mog provides nothing more than a slicker way of searching and weak automatic playlist generation.