MOG Gets Green Light From Apple For Upcoming iPhone App, Lands Deal With Roku

Good news, MOG fans. The online music streaming service, which allows users to listen to as many songs as they want for a flat monthly fee, has had its iPhone application approved by Apple after spending well over a month in App Store purgatory. The application isn’t available for the iPhone quite yet (MOG says it will launch in the next few weeks), but it’s been given the green light by Apple, which is important considering that the company was worried it might be blocked. In addition to that news, MOG has also announced a new partnership to put MOG on Roku media players.

Roku makes an inexpensive set-top box for streaming media to your TV; this marks the first hardware integration for MOG. The service is included as part of MOG’s existing premium plan, which runs $4.99 a month and lets you stream as much music as you’d like from the site (and now, your Roku box). MOG CEO David Hyman says that this is the first on-demand music service that’s on Roku, noting that Pandora’s Internet Radio is available as well (Pandora doesn’t let you choose what song you want to listen to).

MOG’s iPhone app, which we got a preview of in March, lets you download an entire album to your phone in one tap (it looks quite nice). It also includes a radio feature that lets you stream songs that sound similar to a few seed artists or songs, as you would with Pandora. Apple’s approval of the application has to have the company and investors)breathing a sigh of relief — a big part of MOG’s premium strategy involves its mobile applications, and for a while it was looking like Apple might block it because it stands to compete with its own upcoming cloud-based music service.

All-you-can-eat access to MOG’s mobile applications will cost $9.99, which includes access to the aforementioned web and Roku service. Hyman says that we can likely expect the iPhone application in July, and that it will launch alongside an Android app.