A month ago we were criticizing MOG for over promising and under delivering with their new All Access music service. Our chief complaint was that the service wasn’t free, which was the original vision.
Today though, we reported that the odds are against Spotify launching for free in the U.S., and MySpace Music may move to a subscription model. Suddenly, MOG may be right in the thick of things, despite the fact that they will charge $5/month for the service.
So the timing was right today for MOG to release a first teaser video of All Access. This shows off just a part of the service – playlists. But from watching the video it’s clear that they are creating one heck of a user experience. Search looks to be extremely fast, with intelligent auto-complete. Adding songs from various places in the service is simple (compare to MySpace Music, which is still cumbersome after a year). And users can make the playlists private or public.
The social aspect of the service, including public and shareable playlists, is an advantage over Spotify. Spotify is mostly about you and your music, and you aren’t bothered with stuff from other people. But I like the idea of finding new playlists from friends, or that have been made popular by others. I also like that MOG is browser based and doesn’t require a download. I’ve been testing Spotify but only have it on one computer, so I can’t use it all the time.
It’s still way too early to call services like MOG All Access, or the upcoming and still secretive Rdio, a sucess. But users will pay for experience and convenience. I like what I’m seeing so far.