MOG, a great music site that somehow we’ve never covered, is a social networking site for blogging music aficionados. It’s a little bit Last.fm, a little bit iLike, and a little bit something else.
The existing MOG service is centered around a bit of software that you download to your PC (Windows or Mac). Like iLike, MOG tracks all of the music you listen to. However, where iLike just monitors iTunes, MOG tries to track all the music you listen to on your computer or iPod.
Each user has their own MOG page (Example – Ben Gibbard from Death Cab for Cutie) showing the music they are listening to. Other users can comment on the page, etc (normal social networking stuff). MOG also compares your listening habits to others and suggests new music you might like. Each album and song also has it’s own MOG page, along with links to purchase the music.
This morning MOG is launching a new feature – an embeddable Flash music player, making them a little bit like iJigg, too.
The new player will allow bands and fans to upload songs to their MOG page and syndicate them across the web with a few lines of code. It also provides a new revenue stream for MOG through song tags that link to music purchases on Amazon and iTunes. However, the new feature comes with a few requirements: the player only plays one song at a time, and the MOG post they upload the song to must have some written commentary in it. The new player can only play a single file at a time, fast-forward, and reverse. The lack of a playlist is a bit of a let down.
Here’s the embeddable widget:
The new player is clearly an attempt to further take on the MySpace Music and the other major music communities like myStrands and last.fm. This is a battle on the mind of MOG founder David Hyman, who cites the depth of user interaction, particularly artist-fan interaction, as their main distinction.
MOG has an extensive database linking songs and artists, using Gracenote’s wave-matching and text matching to map the song you play to the one they’ve got on file. The tracker updates your MOG in real time with the contents of your library and what your top played songs are. Each song also has a 30 second sample for your MOG’s visitors.
All the song updates, blog posts, and other widgets, are displayed in drag-n-droppable AJAX boxes. If you don’t want your friends to know you listened to Celine Dion, you are free to manually edit each of the boxes, adding or deleting items.
MOG claims 20,000 users, 200,000 uniques/month and is currently privately funded to the tune of $1.4 million. For a small site, they’ve done a very good job of attracting some big name bands to participate.
Nice! It looks like MOG might be positioning itself to become the youtube of music, about time someone did.
Well done to you MOG, really nice app! I really can see this being popular..
On another note, has anybody noticed that, any new web 2.0 companies these days, seem to be using some ridicules names.. “MOG” no fence but what does that mean.. what do any of the new company names mean!
Looks Like were really are running out of domain names!
Petrol running out, domain names running out.. the world is coming to a end!..lol
Andrew
http://www.specsfinder.co.uk
All of the features you refer to relating to Mog, except this new widget, have long been available on last.fm. In fact, I struggle to see any significant difference between the two services, except for Mog’s American base and its greater emphasis upon social aspects via its blogging rather than forum interaction. I’d be interested to know how big Mog’s user base is relative to last.fm’s stated figure of 15m.
Nick, have definitely made my day by linking to Ben Gibbard’s MOG page.
I think MOG is cool. I like the community ascpect of it!
– I also liked looking into Ben gibbard’s head –
– Death Cab for Cutie – Rocks!
MOG definitely means something. in fact, there is a “story of MOG” link on the bottom of each page. http://mog.com/story
is MOG any stranger word than BLOG? : )
From what I can tell, last.fm clearly emphasizes user’s playlists and the stats that surround them, not really the blogging aspects, like MOG, which I find to be a lot more interesting. I know that last.fm has a ‘journal’ feature, but no one I know actually uses it since it’s clearly not the central feature of last.fm.
I guess it’s slightly interesting that someone’s top artist of last week was “The Beatles”, but it’s much more interesting to read *why* they happen to like Abbey Road more than the White Album.
I’m a fan of mog, over last.fm.
Is it me or can you not read the story of mog without signing up for an account?
Bit harsh…
The problem I’ve found with MOG is that its tracking application kept crashing or eating 100% of my CPU. This may have just been because I was using the app right after the site launched though. What’s worse is that it didn’t recognize any of my indie stuff. As a podcaster that plays indie stuff almost entirely, this made the service utterly useless to me.
I’m really enjoying the ability to tag multiple artists within the journal posts. This makes for a really great tool for podcasters (I’m starting to post my tracklists/show notes as journals) since the artist’s main page will show journals referring to that artist. This way I can possibly pull in new listeners that see my post in the journal section.
Plus being able to recommend a song to a group of people is great.
The only thing I’m liking about MOG is the widgets on the user page to that’s not enough to keep someone like me around.
My vote goes to last.fm
For bands, I think a better option might be http://www.reverbnation.com, which gives you several full-featured flash widgets, including a flash player, interactive calendar and tour map, and mailing list manager.
I’ve not seen you guys cover that site either but you should. For an example of how ReverbNation works, and how well it works with myspace, check out my rock band’s example: http://www.mysp...e.com/brightmen
As you can see the widgets are robust replacements.
I should note that I don’t work for ReverbNation and other than being a pretty happy customer (it’s free), I don’t have any relationship with them at all.
Crap I forgot in the second paragraph to indicate that I’m talking about last.fm
Time for another cup of coffee it seems
I think MOG is the best community hub for music. Check out http://mog.com/mog-o-sphere – which shows every post on MOG. If all you want are stats, last.fm is fine for that. If you want to read great music writing and talk to people about music from Nina Simone to Broken Social Scene, then MOG is the place. You can tag multiple artists with your post, and thanks to the MOG-O-SPHERE, everyone sees what you have to say, not just a small group of people.
And everybody should check out Music Knows too, btw
http://www.musicknows.com
mog is totally addictive. i’ve been lurking on the mog-o-sphere for months now and now there are songs?? help me! this is great!!
I’ve been a mogger since the beginning and think it’s one of the coolest sites around. If you are looking for a social networking site that is centered around music and intelligent discussion, mog is the place. Thanks for shining a little spotlight on the site. It’s a great community.
MusicInterfaces: the biggest difference i can find is its impossible to figure out how to actually use MOG. ive been to their site numerous times out of curiosity since they refuse to unsubscribe me from their ‘daily mog’ email spam, and couldnt figure it out. from the looks of this article, thats because its some proprietary win32/mac app that it wasnt offering me to download since my useragent says linux? and/or a flash app that was a broken box?
last.fm for me..
?uestlove of The Roots has a MOG profile now:
http://mog.com/qoolquest
David Hyman is smart. MOG is smart. Disclosure: we used to work together; that’s how I know he’s smart. But I *use* MOG, and it works great.
MOG is wonderful. It’s a haven for music lovers and bloggers to unite and discuss in a warm and friednly atmosphere. It’s one of the few places on the web where you can truely be (or allow yourself to be) to be “you bad-ass self” (to quote the MOG sign-up page). It where you can proclaim that you love Led Zeppelin, but that Sarah McLachlan is kickass as well. I’ve tried many blogging, friend networking and musical sites and MOG reigns over them all. The MOG-O-Sphere is a stroke of genius – every post, all the time. It beats last.fm and livejournal, hands down.
sorry folks. no linux app for now.
we send out a weekly mog-gazette to members and always unsubscribe our unsubscribers. carmen, feel free to email support@mog.com and we apologize for any issues you have.
I am a long time Pandora supporter. There seems to be a lot of news surrounding last.fm and these other music sites. One of these days when I fond some time I will have to check them out.
It would be nice if these services could somehow stream to my pda. Anyone have any advice?
Mog RoCkS ruLeS…It’S CoOL…NoT CoOl…A CoNTrODrICsHuN…CoMe SeMs’…CoMe MOG…ef’ YER CAN HANDLE THE mogo SphERE!!!…
|x^[o> aaaaahhhhh…….
You can’t keep up with these blasted music social sites. You think oh I’ve got the right one but then you cant help trying out a new one as a name arises from Techcrunch.
They have took the time creating them, I might as well give them my time to test them out.
-Kyle
MOG has the best community of music fans on the Internet. This new music player lets the artists on MOG share their music with the rest of us. Totally wicked.
been using the web now for 10+ years and Mog is the first socnet site that I even looked twice at. Almost seven months here now, I have found the community here, though not of massive sizes, is very tight knit and personable and supportive, for the most part. We all know each other, it seems. word to that. Mog or death peoples!
lester
MOG has wonderful potential to fill in the gaps that LastFM leaves – the social side of things, basically.
Unfortunately, at the moment, MOG’s statistics gathering seems to be running into trouble. The support forums are dominated by problems with the Last Song Played widget, which doesn’t seem to be updating for a lot of users. In my own experience, statistics stalled days ago, and a detailed email to the support team (the solution route recommended on site) has gone unanswered.
MOG is friendly and its social elements are attractive, but if it can’t do what LastFM does so effortlessly (track the stats) then it’s going to lose users, or at least cease to lure users over from LastFM.
No trouble with the stats on my page. Digging Mog-o-matic fully. Checked out Last.fm and it looks like they have some of the same issues you’re talking about. I hope you’ll stick it out bc the MOG community is worth it. The only place I spend what little free time I have online.