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April 29, 2008

Record Labels Strategically Invest $2.8M in MOG

Mark Hendrickson

18 comments »

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
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 10:47 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » 大手レコード会社がMOGに$2.8Mの戦略投資

    April 29th, 2008 at 1:19 pm

  2. Record Labels Strategically Invest $2.8M in MOG « The-social-network.info’s Weblog

    April 29th, 2008 at 10:36 pm

Comments

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  1. Kaiyzen

    April 29th, 2008 at 11:02 am

    Crunchbase is way off base with the funding amount for imeem. Dont know how much it is, but they purchased snocap for a rumored $5 million so its in the 10’s of millions.

  2. 10ha

    April 29th, 2008 at 11:11 am

    and also, last.fm

  3. Jeff

    April 29th, 2008 at 11:12 am

    here’s a good source for funding info on music tech companies:
    http://tinyurl.com/6hhann

  4. Ad

    April 29th, 2008 at 11:28 am

    MOG is cool - I hope that David Hyman is able to pull this off and bridge the ever expanding gap between the artists, the labels and the customers.

  5. Bruce Warila

    April 29th, 2008 at 11:34 am

    I wonder what kind of option agreements come attached to these investments? It seems like a great way for the majors to make bets on the future without buying the farm. I like MOG, glad to see they will be around for a while.

  6. Siddharth

    April 29th, 2008 at 11:35 am

    The big music giants are too active these days on the internet worlds. First PluggedIn and now Mog, what’s next? :-D

  7. Nick

    April 29th, 2008 at 11:38 am

    Check out this comment on VentureBeat. It appears there are privacy issues. MOG scans your hard drive for MP3s and reports it back to MOG. Being that the big labels are investing in it and are known for short-sightedness, this privacy concerned does not seem too far fetched. http://venturebeat.com/2008/04.....ent-806706

  8. Faisal

    April 29th, 2008 at 11:53 am

    Out of sequence post but an important item for tech crunch management to fix it.

    Search in techcrunch blog does not work. If you search anything it returns 10 results all irrelevant and there are no more than 10 invalid results.

    try comscore in the search.

  9. Faisal

    April 29th, 2008 at 11:54 am

    As search does not work on techcrunch i will go to venturebeat to look for information.

    This is how you loose your loyal visitors.

  10. gregory

    April 29th, 2008 at 11:59 am

    … and then it pings those two investor companies whenever it detects a pirated copy on your drive …

  11. Greg

    April 29th, 2008 at 12:32 pm

    (Not Gregory, BTW) Between the investment made in Buzznet (home to Idolator and Stereogum) and this, Universal has made serious waves in the music “blog” arena, though you could certainly argue a MOG is more myspace page than blog). Last summer, it’s news of selling watermarked MP3s was still a bit of an advance, and far more artfully done than the EMI/Apple attempt at the same. When did Universal become the forward thinking record label? Since when is that even possible? I’m surprisingly encouraged.

  12. Liz

    April 29th, 2008 at 12:53 pm

    Posession is legal folks. Cbs owns last.fm - this doesn’t matter. The labels already know everything you do through itunes and Soundscan. This augmented mog data is not that interesting to them

  13. aandarian

    April 29th, 2008 at 5:27 pm

    #3 Jeff,

    Great link, thank you.

  14. aandarian

    April 29th, 2008 at 5:29 pm

    Michael,

    Faisal #8 is right. your search is quiet terrible. I’ve been trying to find the article about Angel and Vc investing for days.

    A

  15. wyly

    April 30th, 2008 at 7:12 am

    What do you people see in these music related social networking sites? I’ve tried them and as far as I am concerned they are time wasters. I want to hear what I want to hear when I want to hear it so I happily pay $15 per month to Napster. I’ve been watching the digital music space closely for about three years and must say I am surprised so much VC interest still exists in these revenue-free “business” models. If a fraction of the money and effort going into these new music models (that is going to end up being wasted) went into convincing Congress to give the industry some teeth to prevent peer to peer file stealing the world would be a better place. Cheers

  16. Gary

    May 19th, 2008 at 8:22 pm

    And once again the artists who create the music get nothing. MySpace is still breaking the law as are a lot of them. Last.fm have been saying for a year they are going to start a royalty program, it still hasn’t happened. MySpace has been in negotiations with BMI for over two years now, still nothing. In this country, if you have enough money and scumbag lawyers, you can break the law all you want. ie: OJ Simpson

    It’s sickening.

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