Yesterday we reported on a music-streaming iPhone application called Rdio that has been waiting for weeks to have an update approved by Apple. Now we’ve learned that this may be part of a new trend: MOG, the music portal that offers an impressive on-demand streaming music service, is also having issues with the App Store. MOG submitted its iPhone application over a month ago, and has heard nothing from Apple since. Phone calls and emails have gone unreturned. And the company is understandably getting nervous that Apple may be thinking of blocking the app.
MOG has a lot riding on its mobile applications — it just closed a new $9.5 million funding round, some of which is going toward expanding its mobile platform. At SXSW it held a press event to preview its iPhone and Android applications, and what it showcased was pretty impressive. For $10 a month, users can stream any song or album they want, and they can locally download entire albums to their phone (which will work even when they lose connectivity) in one tap. → Read More
Things seem to be going well for MOG, the online music company that offers both an on-demand streaming music service and a large network of music blogs. In February the company raised another $9.5 million in funding and it has some promising mobile apps slated for release this quarter. Now the company is sharing some of its growth figures and how they compare with the rest of the industry.
According to Quantcast, the MOG Music Network, which includes thousands of music blogs written by the MOG community, has grown to 13.2M monthly uniques in the United Sates and 23.7M worldwide. To show how that compares with its competitors, MOG plotted the comScore numbers of other popular music services including MTV Networks Online, Vevo, and MySpace Music versus its own Quantcast stats. → Read More
Perhaps acknowledging that the competitive landscape has changed, Spotify has introduced new pricing plans today. Premium desktop and mobile access is now split into two separate tiers, £4.99 and £9.99 per-month in the UK respectively.
Rival We7 introduced identical pricing when it launched its premium offering in late January this year, while US-based MOG is also planning to enter Britain at a very competitive price point, according to reports. → Read More
I’m here in Austin, Texas, where MOG CEO David Hyman is introducing the service’s new mobile functionality. This is a major step for MOG, and may be an inflection point in the success of the service. Up until now, users have been restricted to using MOG’s streaming music service on their computers. That’s fine for casual listening at work, but as we’ve seen with the success of the mobile versions of Pandora, users want mobile. And that’s what MOG is unveiling today. Read below for my notes.
Hyman kicked off the talk with some background information. MOG Music Network, the editorial-based site hosted at MOG.com reaches 16 million unique visitors a month. In December, the company launched MOG ALL ACCESS, its streaming music service that costs $5/month for all-you-can-eat streaming music. The company is getting 17% conversion from its 3 day free trial (which is high). MOG, Hyman says, is a music service people will actually pay for. But the key will be portability.
MOG’s mobile applications for Android and iPhone will launch in Q2, featuring on-demand streams, downloads, MOG Radio, your library and playlists, High Quality audio, and a $10/month price tag. → Read More
When I saw the email talking about MOGMobile, I thought “yes, MOG is releasing a mobile app for their excellent new music service.”
But no. MOG still says a mobile app is coming sometime soon. But MOGMobile is this crazy car they’re having built to take to the SXSW conference in March.
From the guys creating it: “We are basically building out the van with foam which we will fiberglass over. Then we will give the bald bambino 24,000 beautiful blue hair plugs, add a psycko sound system and send her down south.”
That’s a conceptual drawing to the right. Below is the actual interior. I can’t wait to go for a spin in this thing. It just screams understated class. → Read More
MOG’s much anticipated All Access music service launches today for anyone to come and give it a try. I’ve been using the service for the last few weeks and, despite my initial skepticism over the fact that users must pay for the service, I’ve been impressed. MOG makes millions of songs available users on demand over the Internet. The user experience and social aspects of the service put it far ahead of any online music service available today, and it’s well worth the $5/month.
All Access is a nearly flawless product that is an absolute joy to use. Read below for our complete review, and grab one of the 250 free monthly passes we’re giving away to TechCrunch readers. → Read More
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.
MOG has released a short video showing the full service (until now we’ve just had two teasers).
The video is below: → Read More
MOG continues to tease us with short videos showing parts of the upcoming MOG All Access music service. Last week they showed a video on playlist creation – the best part was seeing how search works. Now they’ve uploaded a new video that shows robust music discovery through playlist searching. Type in any number of artists and see playlists that include all of those artists. You can also combine artist names with tags (Miles Davis Dinner Party, etc.).
I’ve been able to test the service and it’s the real deal. I criticized MOG for charging for music when it was first announced because there are free services from iMeem, MySpace Music and others. But since then the landscape has changed – Spotify may not launch for free in the U.S., MySpace Music may move to a paid model, etc.
MOG is focusing on the user experience and making it easy to find and play music. That’s a big difference from the free music streaming services that exist today – those services actually don’t love it when you stream a song because they are paying somewhere between $0.004 and $0.01 per stream. MOG isn’t paying per stream, and so they let you get to and play music very, very quickly. Spotify also does this, but it isn’t available in the U.S. and lacks the social component, which the video shows really helps with discovering music.
MOG says the service will launch soon. It’s going to be very, very good. And if you don’t want to pay the $5/month, you can always write a music blog under their umbrella and get it for free. → Read More
A month ago we were criticizing MOG for over promising and under delivering with their new All Access music service. Our chief complaint was that the service wasn’t free, which was the original vision.
Today though, we reported that the odds are against Spotify launching for free in the U.S., and MySpace Music may move to a subscription model. Suddenly, MOG may be right in the thick of things, despite the fact that they will charge $5/month for the service.
So the timing was right today for MOG to release a first teaser video of All Access. This shows off just a part of the service – playlists. But from watching the video it’s clear that they are creating one heck of a user experience. Search looks to be extremely fast, with intelligent auto-complete. Adding songs from various places in the service is simple (compare to MySpace Music, which is still cumbersome after a year). And users can make the playlists private or public.
The social aspect of the service, including public and shareable playlists, is an advantage over Spotify. Spotify is mostly about you and your music, and you aren’t bothered with stuff from other people. But I like the idea of finding new playlists from friends, or that have been made popular by others. I also like that MOG is browser based and doesn’t require a download. I’ve been testing Spotify but only have it on one computer, so I can’t use it all the time. → Read More
MOG is on the verge of launching a $60/year “all you can eat” music service. We criticized them for over promising and under delivering, since earlier this year they were talking about a completely free music streaming service.
“Will MOG’s user experience be so compelling that users will pay $60/year for something they can get free elsewhere?” I wrote. We’ll see as more details of the service comes out, but MOG seems pretty bullish on the quality of the user experience. So bullish, in fact, that CEO David Hyman is convinced I’ll change my mind once I see it.
One group of bloggers won’t need to make that critical pay/no pay decision, though – MOG network bloggers. The 800 or so third party music bloggers (up from 300 earlier this year) that are part of the MOG network are being given free lifetime passes to the new service.
The email below was sent to MOG network bloggers and forwarded to us. We asked MOG if the deal will apply to new third party bloggers as well, and they say it will. So if you have a music blog and want free music for life, here’s your chance. Just note that MOG has to approve all blogs before they get into the network, so it has to be the real thing.
The email is below: → Read More
Here’s the next contestant in the never ending stream of music services, each of which, inevitably, slide into financial disaster at some point. Music service MOG says they’ll launch MOG All Access by Thanksgiving this year. It’s an on demand music streaming and Internet radio service that will cost $5 per month. The four major labels – Universal Music Group, Sony Music, Warner Music Group and EMI Music are on board, plus thousands of indie labels via IODA and Beggars Group.
Sounds great, except users can listen to streaming on demand music for free today at MySpace Music and Spotify, which is preparing to launch in the U.S. Will MOG’s user experience be so compelling that users will pay $60/year for something they can get free elsewhere?
In January we first heard MOG’s plans for the service. At the time it sounded compelling – it combined a great user experience with a free streaming model. But the crucial part of that service has vaporized – it’s no longer free. And non-free music subscription services don’t work, despite years of attempts by major companies and startups alike.
We’ve championed MOG in the past, but this looks like yet another music failure to us. Too bad the labels didn’t agree to a pure revenue split, which is what CEO David Hyman was hoping for back in January. → Read More
MOG, the very popular music portal and blog network, has closed a new $5 million funding round led by Menlo Ventures, with existing investors Simon Equity Partners and Scott Jones also participating. Menlo Ventures’ Sonja Hoel Perkins will join the company’s board as part of the deal. The company has raised a total of $12.5 million since it was founded in 2005.
MOG has been having a stellar year. In April the site launched a completely overhauled homepage, which now includes music news, reviews, a selection of top posts from its blogs, and a variety of other content. The MOG network now sees over 8 million unique visitors a month, with over 700 blogs that generate over 6,000 posts a week. → Read More
Mog, a music-centric blogging network that launched back in 2006, is evolving once again. The site has relaunched its homepage at Mog.com to serve as an authoritative destination site for music news. It has lofty goals, aspiring to become something akin to a ‘Huffington Post for music’ with a constant stream of content that lures visitors to come back multiple times a day. Coming up with that much quality content isn’t normally easy or cheap, but MOG has at least one ace in the hole: its entire editoral staff consists of only six people, and its contributing authors aren’t getting paid – they’re just writing about what they love.
MOG has built up a thriving network of bloggers over the years, who produce upwards of 5,000 music-related blog posts a week. Most of these bloggers are found on MOG itself, using the site’s own publishing tools to share with other members (called MOGers). The site has also forged deals with around 300 external blogs, driving traffic to them by syndicating portions of their content on MOG in return for allowing MOG to serve as their ad network. Between all of these blogs, MOG sees around 5.7 million unique visitors and 40 million page views a month. → Read More
MOG demo’d the next version of their popular music service to me today, and I was impressed. It combines a best of breed interface with free on demand streaming and a Pandora-like music recommendation engine. The trouble is, it may never launch because only two of the four major music labels are supporting it so far.
MOG has a history of doing cool new things around music. The service today includes a media player plugin that records and analyzes your music habits, a website that has a dedicated page for every artist, album and song with user generated reviews and posts, and an advertising network that provides revenue for 300 top music blogs. Users can also stream music via an excellent front end to Rhapsody.
All of that brings about 5 million unique visitors a month to their network, and the company says they should bring in about $5 million in revenue in 2009. → Read More
When music blog network and discovery platform MOG launched an advertising network last August, CEO David Hyman described it as a “Federated Media for music sites” (note: we partner with FM for TechCrunch). Dubbed MOG Music Network, it allows independent music bloggers to syndicate content to Mog.com and customize ads that appear on their websites, enabling them to generate revenues greater than what they’d get from ad networks like Google AdSense.
Now, a tipster that’s part of the program, tells us that MMN is seriously behind on payments and that they’re raising the payment terms significantly. The company’s e-mail is after the jump. → Read More
MOG has announced that it received a $2.8M strategic investment from Universal Music Group and The Angels’ Forum. We’ve also heard that Sony BMG was also part of the round, which means two major record labels have come together to invest in the same online music venture. Music afficianados can use MOG to blog about their favorite artists and tracks. It also provides software that detects which songs you play on your computer (regardless of the media player you use) and shares your listening habits with friends on the site. This software is not a plugin like iLike’s but a standalone client that runs in the background. Since December, Rhapsody has also integrated with the service, allowing MOG users with Rhapsody accounts to play songs mentioned on MOG directly from blog posts. This strategic investment hopefully will mean that we’ll see even more music delivered through MOG, perhaps eventually a free streaming service for everyone regardless of their Rhapsody status (just speculation at this point). This would align their service more with the Imeem model of providing free ad-supported, and label-sanctioned, music. CrunchBase Information MOG Imeem iLike Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
SpiralFrog has just announced the site is up to over 1 million uniques each month and expected to end this month with over 1.2 million uniques. SpiralFrog, for those of you who don’t remember, is the free (as in ad supported, not P2P) legal music service that unlocks over 1 million songs to their users as long as they log back in to their site at least once every month (an easy task if you update your library frequently). The songs are downloads and played as WMA files under DRM controls. While you’d think the main advantage of a download is portability, most people won’t be able to take songs off their computer because they use iPods that can’t play the WMA files. See more details in our earlier coverage. The songs come from some pretty unique deals with the big labels UMG, EMI, and BMI. In exchange, labels get a share of the ad revenue and affiliate song sales on the site and the comfort of control through the service’s DRM. However, SpiralFrog was over a year in the making and only officially launched last September. A lot has changed since then. Music prices have dropped, DRM is dead (for paid tracks at least), and new legal/questionably legal sites have popped up to serve up free tunes. Competition includes HypeMachine, RadioBlogClub, Deezer, InTune.fm, Mog, Last.fm, Imeem, and a bunch of other sites. One key difference is that users on these sites stream music instead of downloading it, but that doesn’t seem to be slowing down their growth rates. Imeem, which follows an ad splitting model similar to SpiralFrog, did over 3 million monthly uniques around the time SpiralFrog launched last year. Lets not forget that Yahoo may be treading in this territory as well. CrunchBase Information SpiralFrog HypeMachine Deezer MOG Imeem Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
MOG, the blogging network for music lovers, has just launched a new version of its website that features several killer features, most notably integration with Rhapsody’s music service that allows you to stream full songs and albums through MOG itself. MOG is basically a place for people to publish thoughts about music, as well as a place to share the names of the songs they play on their computers (using a downloadable program called MOG-O-MATIC that runs in the background and automatically detects songs no matter which music player is used). This raison d’être has not changed but, rather, has been enhanced by Rhapsody integration, which basically makes MOG into a discovery-oriented interface for streaming music. With many (if not most) song references on the site, you can now click a play button that instantly loads the song into a web-based Rhapsody player running in another window. So, when you’re browsing the MOG network, reading about new music and actually want to hear that music, chances are that you can listen to it straight from MOG. As could be expected, this is only as cool as it sounds if you’re a Rhapsody subscriber, which costs $12 per month. However, non-subscribers will still be treated to the free streaming of 25 songs per month if they download a small application. But if you say “hell no” to a download, use up your handful of freebies, or live outside of the United States, you’ll have to remain satisfied with 30-second-long samples. MOG has done several things to take advantage of Rhapsody integration. The site now sports a clever search tool that lets you search MOG’s blog network and Rhapsody’s collection at the same time. Enter, say, “pearl jam” and a dropdown will quickly display artist, album, and track matches. You can click to view the pages for those matches (which will lead you to blog posts in addition to other information about Pearl Jam), add those matches to your playlists, or play them through Rhapsody. If you dig the musical tastes of a particular mogger, you can also click a button on their profile page called “Play This Page” that will literally play all the music on that person’s page. Similarly, you can choose to play all their recently played songs or all the songs from related blogs (er, mogs). Newcomers who haven’t yet found other moggers with similar tastes can take → Read More
Social music recommendation service MyStrands has completed the second half of their B round, raising an additional $24 million from Spanish Bank BBVA on top of the $25 million we reported earlier. BBVA is a financial services group with more than $782 billion in total assets, 42 million customers in 40 countries and a market capitalization of approximately $95 billion. This brings total financing for the Corvallis, OR based startup to $55 million, significantly more than $5 million raised by London-based Last.fm which started around the same time (later sold for $280 million). MyStands core products are a music recommendation engine for discovering songs you love while on your computer, mobile, and even playing them in bars you frequent. They recently launched a music video product that puts a more pleasant face on YouTube’s music video archives. They’ve made over $12 million in sales from these products during 2007. Even with revenues pacing nicely, $24 million is a lot of capital and its not clear they really need it. The company says the money will go towards expanding their recommendation engine beyond music, although they’re not saying how quite yet. The most MyStrand’s VP of Communications Gabriel Aldamiz-Echevarria will say is that “…the general idea is to keep building technologies that will help people discover different products and services.” Well, now they have quite a war chest to pursue that goal. CrunchBase Information Strands Slacker Last.fm Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Facebook’s new Developer Platform has been live for nearly a day, and data is coming in on which third party applications are the most appealing to Facebook users. The top application, by far, is music service iLike. They currently have just under 40,000 Facebook users, more than the rest of the top ten applications combined. The application was added by 10,000 users within the first ten hours of the service being live, and 10,000 more in the following three hours. It seems to be increasing by about 100/minute at this point. Once installed, users can search for and add their favorite music and concert information to their profile. Competitor MOG is also popular, coming in currently as the fifth most popular Facebook application and just over 3,000 users. Causes On Facebook, the application that we covered yesterday, is in the top twenty apps and has just over 1,000 users. → Read More
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