Music streaming service MOG is today announcing partnerships with mobile, audio and video equipment manufacturer JVC as well as with Aha by HARMAN, an interactive platform that brings web content to the automobile. The companies will begin using MOG’s APIs to integrate the music service into their platforms and products. The first result of the new partnerships is MOG’s launch on Subaru vehicles.
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There’s already a bunch of music apps available for Logitech’s Squeezebox (including Rhapsody, Last.fm, Pandora, DI.fm, Napster, Sky.fm, Spotify and Deezer) but this morning there was some good news for MOG fans in the United States.
Logitech has teamed up with MOG to give users access to the latter’s music streaming library, which consists of 13 million songs, custom radio stations, artist-only stations and more. → Read More
Unlimited streaming music service MOG is expanding its footprint yet again with a new AT&T deal that will see its mobile application pre-installed on AT&T’s first new LTE smartphones: the Samsung Galaxy S Skyrocket and the HTC Vivid. The app will be pre-loaded onto these two AT&T 4G (LTE) phones, and customers will be able to try the service for free for a week. In addition, the company has integrated with AT&T’s billing system, so customers can pay for MOG via their regular phone bill.
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Earlier today we ventured to downtown New York for a demo of a BMW equipped with MOG’s music streaming app. MOG has been working with Mini and BMW on this app for a while. The BMW version is slated to launch in mid-October and it works with BMW’s new ConnectedDrive technology, available in 2011 and beyond models. MOG’s music library contains 12 million songs.
I love Yvo Schaap, even though I’ve never met him in person.
Wanna know why? Because the man keeps on digging up interesting stuff by simply perusing code, and then alerting us.
Schaap found the embeddable +1 button and a a link to the Google Games logo before either of them was publicly released, and now he may have identified several companies that will be partnering with Facebook for the imminent launch of the latter’s Music service (which may be called Vibes). → Read More
Yesterday, we outlined a bit of what we’ve heard about Facebook’s upcoming f8 conference. One big launch will be their official foray into music. Today, we’ve heard more about that launch.
One thing we’ve heard from a very good source is that a key aspect of the service will be “scrobbling”. The term, made popular by Last.fm, means that when you listen to a song, it gets sent to your profile without you have to do anything. I assume there will be a way to turn this off, or a way for you to selectively share songs, but this is a key to the service. → Read More
MOG, the all-you-can-eat streaming music service that competes with the likes of Spotify and Rdio, has some good news for Mac users: it’s just launched a native application for OS X, which is now available on the Mac App Store. You can download it right here (the service is free for 14 days, then costs $10/month, which includes access to the web and mobile applications as well).
The native Mac application will look familiar to anyone who has used the service’s recently-revamped HTML5 web app , because it’s based on the same code. It isn’t loaded with native Mac widgets, but it works well — everything feels snappy, and in my testing songs began playing in less than a second. → Read More
The online music race is now an all-out sprint: Amazon, Google, and Apple are now all offering (or preparing to launch) services that let you upload your music collection to the cloud, letting you listen to the music you own wherever you are. But they aren’t just competing with each other — another group of services that includes MOG, Rdio, and (eventually) Spotify lets users stream any song as often as they’d like for a reasonable monthly rate of around $10 a month.
It’s getting fun. And today, MOG is making the race all that much closer.
The service has just rolled out a new Beta player to users that streamlines the MOG experience, putting a much heavier emphasis on building out playlists and recommendations than its predecessor did. → Read More
If you’re a Sonos fan you’ll be happy to know that MOG, the music streaming service that competes with sites like Spotify, Rdio, and Pandora, has just hit the list of Sonos sources. It is, in short, a double rainbow of music goodness. They’re offering all Sonos users 14-day free trial and new users can get 20% off Sonos bundles with MOG access. You can check it out here.
The service is available now and costs $9.99 for the “primo” streaming subscription. → Read More
For the third set of interviews from last week’s excellent SFMusicTech event, I talk with David Hyman, the current CEO of MOG, the co-founder of Addicted to Noise, former CEO of Gracenote and one of the smartest and most experienced pioneers of the digital music revolution.
Hyman’s MOG is one of the most interesting and important contemporary start-ups. Like Pandora and Spotify, MOG is pioneering a cloud based streaming service for accessing our music. So will MOG succeed? As Hyman told me, “it’s all about timing and I think our timing is good.” → Read More
Today, Mini announced that a new streaming audio app from MOG has been approved to make its way to their Mini Connected system. Mini Connected is an in-car entertainment system that is fully integrated with the iPhone. A Mini Connected app is run on iOS outputting metadata to the center screen where the data is rebuilt on Mini’s interface. → Read More
Are you a MOG user in proud possession of a Sonos Multi-Room Music System? Let me make you a happy man or woman: US-based MOG users will have access to the company’s on-demand music service through Sonos later this spring, the companies jointly announced this morning.
With the addition of MOG, and recently Rdio and Spotify, the list of available music services is beginning to look like a very appealing offer for most anyone (the list also includes Last.fm, Napster, Pandora, Rhapsody, SiriusXM, among others). → Read More
We created subscriptions for publishing apps, not SaaS apps.
—email attributed to Steve Jobs
There’s been so much confusion in the wake of Apple’s new subscription billing policy for apps that Steve Jobs felt the need to issue the proclamation above via his preferred method, a personal email. (It’s his version of the burning bush). While Apple’s new policy clearly states that all subscriptions for purchasing “content, functionality, or services in an app” must go through Apple, Jobs suggests that Apple will make a distinction between “publishing apps” and “SaaS apps” (software as a service). Apps like Salesforce or Evernote, for example, operate under an SaaS subscription, and are available to the same subscribers on the Web and other devices besides the iPhone.
Apple appears to be backtracking here. As I suggested on Friday in a Fly or Die video with Rhapsody’s president Jon irwin (who offers a music streaming subscription app on the iPhone), Apple’s initial broad-stroke rule may very well have been a trial balloon. The subscription billing system was obviously designed with media apps in mind, particularly publications. Maybe Apple won’t apply it to other types of subscription apps. Indeed, this latest email from Jobs appears to signal that Apple is adjusting to the market reaction. → Read More
Here’s some big news for MOG, the premium music service that lets you pay $10 a month to stream an unlimited number of songs to your computer and your mobile devices (the mobile apps also let you download entire albums to your phone and save them locally, which is very handy).
Today the company has announced that it’s landed a deal with Verizon, and it’s a big one: MOG will come preinstalled on all 4G Verizon Android phones. MOG will also be featured in Verizon’s V CAST app store, and users will be able to sign up for MOG accounts using Verizon carrier billing.
This is a big win for MOG, which has the challenge of convincing people to pay for a subscription music service (no easy feat) and is up against some strong competitors like Rdio and Spotify (if it ever launches in the US). → Read More
This guest post was written by David Hyman, a self-proclaimed music junkie and CEO and founder of MOG, a startup that offers both a premium music service and a portal of music content. Before starting MOG, David served as CEO of Gracenote, the world’s largest music database and music-identification service, which sold to Sony for $260 million in 2008. Previously, he was SVP of Marketing at MTV Interactive, and he co-founded Addicted to Noise, the webzine that pioneered multimedia music reporting and around-the-clock music news. In 2008, he founded Musica Tecnomica, a regular gathering of music-focused innovators in San Francisco.
Dalton Caldwell, founder/ex-CEO of imeem, recently gave a presentation at the Y Combinator Startup School on the impossibility of creating success in digital music. I’d like to provide an alternate point of view and make it clear that, like in any business, “making it” requires know-how, hard work, diligence and passion. → Read More
After months of waiting, it’s finally here. Streaming music service MOG has launched its mobile applications for Android and iPhone, giving subscribers unlimited access to its library of 8 million songs, which can be streamed or downloaded over both 3G and WiFi. If you listen to a lot of music, or just like being able to listen to music on-demand without having to sync to your PC, this is definitely worth checking out. Access to the mobile service costs $9.99 a month, but MOG is offering free 3-day trials when you download the apps (no credit card is required).
When MOG launched its All Access music service back in December, we gave it a rave review, but it was missing one key feature: mobile. These applications bring all of the functionality of the desktop service and they do it one better, by allowing you to store as many songs and albums as you’d like to your phone’s storage for offline access. → Read More
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). → Read More
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
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
