MOG Streaming Service Quick Thoughts

Posted by on December 3, 2009

mogWe spent an hour futzing around with MOG.com, the new streaming service “that promises an experience better than Rhapsody, Pandora and iTunes combined” for $5 a month, and here are our quick thoughts:

Pros
– Excellent sound quality. My entirely non-scientific evaluation from some decent computer speakers leads me to believe it sounds much fuller and less compressed than Rhapsody or Pandora’s streams.
– Slick interface. It blows away Rhapsody’s clunky UI.
– There’s quite a bit of content for each artist, as MOG uses it’s advertising network to pull down artist-specific news posts.
– There’s a lot of extra information like lyrics and bios.
– There’s a great slider function that lets you find a preferred balance between listening to an all-artist station and a station of just similar artists. You can adjust the slider at any point in the playlist. We really like this feature.
– The library seems pretty good, with all four major labels signed on, and we see most of the notable metal labels (Roadrunner, Nuclear Blast, Century Media, Ferret, Relapse, etc.)

Cons
– The library isn’t that complete: Tool and Metallica are among notable artists not yet signed on, but this could/should change as the service develops.
– You can’t edit playlists on-the-fly. So let’s say you really like what’s coming up on a “similar artists” queue, but there’s a couple skippables, you can’t remove them ahead of time or wedge in something else without wiping the entire queue clean.
– The recommendation engine seems to be a bit more refined than the other services.
– Some of the bios seem to be out of date and the news/blog posts are either user generated or from other sites, so it’s a bit slipshod.

Have you had time to use it? What do you think? Is a $5 monthly streaming buffet worth it?

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Categorised in: Digital Media