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.
MOG’s existing products are obviously doing quite well, but I can’t help but wonder if the new round was in part helped by its unlaunched music streaming product, which we previewed back in January. At the time we called it Ultimate Streaming Music App that may never launch, because it only had two of the four major labels signed on. If MOG managed to get the remaining holdouts on board, the company would be a ripe target for investors. The company declined to comment on the matter, but we’ll be keeping an eye out for more on this.
I think their is enough content for a standalone MusicCrunch.com
If it’s viable why are they raising more money?
i.e. viable = profitable = sustainable ?
Is my logic not correct?
Your logic is correct
Maybe they want to expand and buy more users or launch a new product feature? that also is logical!
Why not go the Debt route ? Then the shareholders dont get diluted.
To SJ’s point, companies generally raise money to grow – or accelerate the growth of – their business.
It’s not too hard to connect the dots with this news and TC’s January coverage that Jason aludes to, is it?
“If MOG managed to get the remaining holdouts on board, the company would be a ripe target for investors.”
Huh? Can you elaborate?
Meaning, if MOG gets the streaming deal from all the majors, their market viability would skyrocket.
If that’s on the way, I couldn’t be more excited. I love MOG and $5m their way could only benefit, well… me!
Actually viable = eventually maybe profitable = maybe sustainable
Anything David Hyman does is golden.
Amen!
heh..heh…dude, he said hymen.
Another Valley love fest. Pretty funny stuff and very transparent to the real world.
Doubled traffic since Jan of this year? Incredible. Can’t wait to see what they’ll roll out!
the music homepage is pretty comprehensive in terms of news. i just glanced at it for the first time today, and for what I can see it’s just about every music post on the net. i’m going to have to dig deeper and see what else is under the hood.
i’m all for seeing what they do next, $5 million is a lot new features.
I’d honestly rather see tech investment in music than “e-customer intelligence,” some twitter variant or some other intangible thing.
There must be something going on under the hood, or they would be saying that they aren’t going to have a music streaming product. I think if it was Mog that was the place that finally figured out how to have a decent streaming music service, they would be well positioned, because of all their blogging/social networking stuff. I can’t see 5 million for just a blogging site.
What makes up the MOG network? The key is what is the relationship they have with all these other sites? Like iLike, if these sites drop out and move on to another network wouldn’t this drive down the value?
I found out about some pretty cool bands through MOG. Interested to see what they do with the $5M.
MOG’s shopping a subscription plan to the labels. That’s the big plan for biz model 4.0.