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.

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SpiralFrog has just announced the site is up to over 1 million uniques each month and expected to end this month with over 1.2 million uniques. SpiralFrog, for those of you who don’t remember, is the free (as in ad supported, not P2P) legal music service that unlocks over 1 million songs to their users as long as they log back in to their site at least once every month (an easy task if you update your library frequently). The songs are downloads and played as WMA files under DRM controls.

While you’d think the main advantage of a download is portability, most people won’t be able to take songs off their computer because they use iPods that can’t play the WMA files. See more details in our earlier coverage.

The songs come from some pretty unique deals with the big labels UMG, EMI, and BMI. In exchange, labels get a share of the ad revenue and affiliate song sales on the site and the comfort of control through the service’s DRM.

However, SpiralFrog was over a year in the making and only officially launched last September. A lot has changed since then. Music prices have dropped, DRM is dead (for paid tracks at least), and new legal/questionably legal sites have popped up to serve up free tunes. Competition includes HypeMachine, RadioBlogClub, Deezer, InTune.fm, Mog, Last.fm, Imeem, and a bunch of other sites. One key difference is that users on these sites stream music instead of downloading it, but that doesn’t seem to be slowing down their growth rates. Imeem, which follows an ad splitting model similar to SpiralFrog, did over 3 million monthly uniques around the time SpiralFrog launched last year. Lets not forget that Yahoo may be treading in this territory as well.

HypeMachine

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Deezer

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Last.fm

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Imeem

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SpiralFrog

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MOG, the blogging network for music lovers, has just launched a new version of its website that features several killer features, most notably integration with Rhapsody’s music service that allows you to stream full songs and albums through MOG itself.

MOG is basically a place for people to publish thoughts about music, as well as a place to share the names of the songs they play on their computers (using a downloadable program called MOG-O-MATIC that runs in the background and automatically detects songs no matter which music player is used). This raison d’être has not changed but, rather, has been enhanced by Rhapsody integration, which basically makes MOG into a discovery-oriented interface for streaming music.

With many (if not most) song references on the site, you can now click a play button that instantly loads the song into a web-based Rhapsody player running in another window. So, when you’re browsing the MOG network, reading about new music and actually want to hear that music, chances are that you can listen to it straight from MOG.

As could be expected, this is only as cool as it sounds if you’re a Rhapsody subscriber, which costs $12 per month. However, non-subscribers will still be treated to the free streaming of 25 songs per month if they download a small application. But if you say “hell no” to a download, use up your handful of freebies, or live outside of the United States, you’ll have to remain satisfied with 30-second-long samples.

MOG has done several things to take advantage of Rhapsody integration. The site now sports a clever search tool that lets you search MOG’s blog network and Rhapsody’s collection at the same time. Enter, say, “pearl jam” and a dropdown will quickly display artist, album, and track matches. You can click to view the pages for those matches (which will lead you to blog posts in addition to other information about Pearl Jam), add those matches to your playlists, or play them through Rhapsody.

If you dig the musical tastes of a particular mogger, you can also click a button on their profile page called “Play This Page” that will literally play all the music on that person’s page. Similarly, you can choose to play all their recently played songs or all the songs from related blogs (er, mogs).

Newcomers who haven’t yet found other moggers with similar tastes can take advantage of something called “The Magic Button” in the recommendations section. The feature, which isn’t new, will find other moggers who may share your tastes by analyzing the songs you have played on your computer (or, now, through Rhapsody on the site). Once you find these moggers, you can play their pages (a new feature) effectively using the magic button as a personalized radio station of sorts.

There are a handful of other, more minor improvements made with this release. The default theme is no longer boogey nights brown and orange but rather a more sober white and tan. The MOG-O-MATICS application has been fine tuned for better performance and reliability. And posts are now sorted reverse chronologically and truncated when too long.

Check out an interview of CEO David Hyman by Michael Arrington below:

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Social music recommendation service MyStrands has completed the second half of their B round, raising an additional $24 million from Spanish Bank BBVA on top of the $25 million we reported earlier.

BBVA is a financial services group with more than $782 billion in total assets, 42 million customers in 40 countries and a market capitalization of approximately $95 billion. This brings total financing for the Corvallis, OR based startup to $55 million, significantly more than $5 million raised by London-based Last.fm which started around the same time (later sold for $280 million).

MyStands core products are a music recommendation engine for discovering songs you love while on your computer, mobile, and even playing them in bars you frequent. They recently launched a music video product that puts a more pleasant face on YouTube’s music video archives. They’ve made over $12 million in sales from these products during 2007.

Even with revenues pacing nicely, $24 million is a lot of capital and its not clear they really need it. The company says the money will go towards expanding their recommendation engine beyond music, although they’re not saying how quite yet. The most MyStrand’s VP of Communications Gabriel Aldamiz-Echevarria will say is that “…the general idea is to keep building technologies that will help people discover different products and services.”

Well, now they have quite a war chest to pursue that goal.

MyStrands

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Slacker

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Last.fm

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Facebook’s new Developer Platform has been live for nearly a day, and data is coming in on which third party applications are the most appealing to Facebook users. The top application, by far, is music service iLike. They currently have just under 40,000 Facebook users, more than the rest of the top ten applications combined.

The application was added by 10,000 users within the first ten hours of the service being live, and 10,000 more in the following three hours. It seems to be increasing by about 100/minute at this point. Once installed, users can search for and add their favorite music and concert information to their profile.

Competitor MOG is also popular, coming in currently as the fifth most popular Facebook application and just over 3,000 users.

Causes On Facebook, the application that we covered yesterday, is in the top twenty apps and has just over 1,000 users.

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Music community site MOG launched a 2.0 version of their site today. We previously covered MOG in our roundup of social music services, and when they launched an embeddable music player.

The core MOG service is a client application called Mog-o-matic that monitors what music you listen on a variety of media players. That’s paired with personal music profile pages where you can blog about the music you like and find recommendations for new songs from users like yourself. Recommendations are either based on the bands you manually add to your collection of artists you listen to or gleaned from Mog-o-matic.

MOG’s core functionality is still there, but they’ve reorganized and added some new features to make the site appealing to non-members.

The new design has brought order to chaos that used to rule the main page by categorizing posts by type and content along with a new personalization tool called the “Magic Button”. To make it easier for non-Moggers to surf the site, posts are now tagged as music reviews or news and segmented based on whether the post includes audio, video, or just plain text. The new “Magic Button” lets you apply a personalized filter to any content on the site based on your Mog-o-matic music profile.

The video section also includes a really cool YouTube hack called MOG TV (competitor iLike has a similar feature). MOG TV consists of all the YouTube music videos for a given artist. It reminds me of MTV back when they used to actually play music videos. You can filter which of the 400K of indexed YouTube videos play based on artist, the music preferences listed on your profile, friends preferences, or the Magic Button.

MOG is most similar to Last.fm, with it’s journal feature where listeners can make blog posts about any band. However, MOG has made user generated posts the focus of the site, with music recommendation secondary. Last.fm focuses on their music recommendation software, with user generated content secondary. iLike, recently hit over 500K users.

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Keeping with the theme of Mike’s Online Photo Editing Overview, I wanted to cover some of the entrants into social music. Music was probably the first type of rich media to really go “Web 2.0″ and it’s become a pretty popular place for startups. As a result, there are some great Rich Internet Applications built around social music. Anyone who makes music a part of their daily lives has no shortage of options when it comes to finding new music and sharing with friends.

FineTune

Finetune is a relatively new application written in Flash. It’s my favorite out of the bunch and I covered it on my ZDNet blog. What makes Finetune stand out is that in addition to the standard “artist radio”, it allows users to build playlists of specific songs. The minimum playlist is 45 songs and you can have up to three songs per artist. With custom playlists, you can make sure you’re only listening to songs you want. Finetune also gets points because in addition to the web version, it runs on the Wii and there is an Apollo-based desktop client.

Pandora

Pandora is the granddaddy of the bunch and it’s one of the Web 2.0 applications that Mike can’t live without. It is built using OpenLaszlo and provides the cleanest experience out of all the applications on the list. Pandora uses the Music Genome Project to generate a stream of songs that you’ll like based on how you rate previous tracks. You create stations around artists, songs or albums and you can provide feedback (thumbs up or thumbs down) on the songs Pandora chooses. Tech Crunch’s coverage of Pandora is here.

Last.Fm

last.fm is another Web 2.0 veteran and is more socially-slanted than the others. Tagging is a big part of the last.fm experience and you can tag any song that comes along in addition to being able to listen to “user tag radio” which is based on tracks that users have tagged with a specific genera. last.fm has a separate desktop application that “scrobbles” the songs you listen to and generates a music profile that you can share with friends. See Tech Crunch’s coverage of last.fm here.

MOG

MOG is all about a music community. It’s very blog-centric and revolves around user pages, or “Mogs”. You build your Mog around songs you’re listening too and artists you like. That builds something like a profile for you that users can browse to and comment on. It also uses this profile to suggest other people or music that you might like. Tech Crunch’s coverage of MOG is here.

RadioBlogClub

radio.blog.club is another music service that builds playlists based on an artist or song you specify. I’ve heard the least about it, but the interface is good. When you browse to the site and type in an artist or song, it builds a playlist of 10 songs for you. In my experience the recommendation system for radio.blog.club wasn’t the best, but they do allow you to embed their player on your blog. This seems to be the least robust of the applications but still worth a mention.

MyStrands

MyStrands started off as MusicStrands and is a downloaded desktop application that works with your current music players to build recommendations based on what you’re listening to. In many ways it’s similar to last.fm’s “Scrobbling” but MyStrands ties in with your mobile device and seems to provide a more social recommendation system. By tying in with music on mobile phones, MyStrands is a bit ahead of the others and it helps tie all of your music collections together. Tech Crunch’s coverage of MyStrands is here.

iLike

iLike is an iTunes plug-in that makes your music library more social. It tracks what you’re listening too and recommends songs and people with similar tastes. It hooks in nicely with the iTunes interface and recommends music as you’re playing songs. I listen to some pretty obscure stuff and the recommendations were good. They also have a widget for MySpace that is formatted to sit nicely in the “Music” section of the profile. Tech Crunch’s coverage of iLike is here.

iJigg

iJigg is a digg-esque music discovery service that I had a lot of fun playing with. Users vote on individual songs and the most popular rise to the top of the front page. You can’t do any “related artists” with iJigg, but you can browse by genre so that you can target your music discovery. The iJigg player can also be embedded on other sites so you can share it with friends. As this service gets more popular, I think it will be a great way for bands to get discovered. Tech Crunch’s coverage if iJigg is here.

Ryan Stewart is an expert in Rich Internet Applications. Ryan writes his personal blog here and also writes a RIA blog for ZDNet called The Universal Desktop.

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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.

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