In a world of nonexistent CD sales and unstoppable music pirating, the question on everyone's mind is "how do we make money off of music again?" Big record labels scrambled to think (all the while hiring lawyers to sue the pants off of citizens who accidentally downloaded six tracks from Kazaa in 2000), but entrepreneurial innovators took the opportunity to get innovative.
Thus arose a new trend in the media sphere. You can have music -- all of the music you could ever want -- streaming on the internet for a minuscule price per month. Spotify does it (but sadly, Americans can't get it), Pandora does it, Last.FM and Rhapsody do it, and now MOG does it. What is MOG you ask?
MOG (a shorter, snappier nickname for "Music Blog") is a music blog aggregate service (of which TMT is a part), filtering music blog content from the web and placing it on their main page. Not only that, but MOG has since formed an alliance with the "Big Four" music labels (EMI, Warner, Sony, and Universal) to create an "All Access" service where music fans can listen to an endless supply of streaming music for $5 a month on the web and $12-$15 via mobile device. Fans can even customize their own playlists on MOG, where, like Pandora, users can create playlists of "similar artists" and share them with fellow MOG users.
"Rhapsody costs too much and Pandora doesn't let you play any song you want at any time. We've taken the best parts of all of the existing services and left behind what didn't work," says Andy Phillips, MOG's Editor-in-Chief, when asked why users would prefer MOG to other web-based streaming services.
According to MOG CEO David Hyman, his service is a "revolutionary listening experience that will forever change how you discover music and truly redefines what radio is, and killer tools for discovery through other users of the service. And you get it all monthly for the price of a beer. We’re setting the music listening bar." Beer, eh? The man has a point.
MOG's music service is currently in beta-testing, but will be available for mass-usage come Thanksgiving 2009.
