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).
You can see from the video how easy it is to search for artists, albums or songs, and add them to your library or to playlists. Based on this alone MOG is better than MySpace Music, which continues to try to slow down users – the more songs they stream, the more MySpace has to pay. MOG doesn’t have that problem because they pay the labels a set fee per user every month.
But MOG also has another killer feature – MOG Radio. The video shows how it works. Type in any artist and start to listen to songs just from that artist. use the slider to add in more similar artists. Move it all the way to the right and you basically have Pandora. But the ability to just listen to music from one artist is a really compelling product. I’d consider paying $5/month just for this feature alone.
I also like MOG’s social features. You can search for playlists created by other users, or go to user profile pages to see what music they’ve been listening to. If you like their taste, you can follow them and get updates on new music they are playing.
You can see all of these features in the overview video embedded above. Watch that video and then decide: would you pay $5/month for MOG All Access? Let us know in the comments.