Is it worth it? I’m definitely starting to think so. Partially because of the quality of the product (more on that below), and partially because the free streaming music business model seems to be falling apart. Spotify is delaying U.S. launch, MySpace may move to a subscription service, and the iMeem service, recently acquired by MySpace, may not even be around for much longer. By this time next year there may not be any legal free streaming services left.

But even with free streaming competitors, MOG may be worth it. I’ve been testing the service for a couple of weeks and it is a significantly better user experience than any other music service I’ve tried, including Spotify, MySpace Music and Pandora.

It’s just incredibly easy to search for and discover music, add it to playlists or your library, and start listening.

MOG has released a short video showing the full service (until now we’ve just had two teasers).

You can see from the video how easy it is to search for artists, albums or songs, and add them to your library or to playlists. Based on this alone MOG is better than MySpace Music, which continues to try to slow down users – the more songs they stream, the more MySpace has to pay. MOG doesn’t have that problem because they pay the labels a set fee per user every month.

But MOG also has another killer feature – MOG Radio. The video shows how it works. Type in any artist and start to listen to songs just from that artist. use the slider to add in more similar artists. Move it all the way to the right and you basically have Pandora. But the ability to just listen to music from one artist is a really compelling product. I’d consider paying $5/month just for this feature alone.

I also like MOG’s social features. You can search for playlists created by other users, or go to user profile pages to see what music they’ve been listening to. If you like their taste, you can follow them and get updates on new music they are playing.

You can see all of these features in the overview video embedded above. Watch that video and then decide: would you pay $5/month for MOG All Access? Let us know in the comments.

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MOG continues to tease us with short videos showing parts of the upcoming MOG All Access music service. Last week they showed a video on playlist creation – the best part was seeing how search works. Now they’ve uploaded a new video that shows robust music discovery through playlist searching. Type in any number of artists and see playlists that include all of those artists. You can also combine artist names with tags (Miles Davis Dinner Party, etc.).

I’ve been able to test the service and it’s the real deal. I criticized MOG for charging for music when it was first announced because there are free services from iMeem, MySpace Music and others. But since then the landscape has changed – Spotify may not launch for free in the U.S., MySpace Music may move to a paid model, etc.

MOG is focusing on the user experience and making it easy to find and play music. That’s a big difference from the free music streaming services that exist today – those services actually don’t love it when you stream a song because they are paying somewhere between $0.004 and $0.01 per stream. MOG isn’t paying per stream, and so they let you get to and play music very, very quickly. Spotify also does this, but it isn’t available in the U.S. and lacks the social component, which the video shows really helps with discovering music.

MOG says the service will launch soon. It’s going to be very, very good. And if you don’t want to pay the $5/month, you can always write a music blog under their umbrella and get it for free.

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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.

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“Will MOG’s user experience be so compelling that users will pay $60/year for something they can get free elsewhere?” I wrote. We’ll see as more details of the service comes out, but MOG seems pretty bullish on the quality of the user experience. So bullish, in fact, that CEO David Hyman is convinced I’ll change my mind once I see it.

One group of bloggers won’t need to make that critical pay/no pay decision, though – MOG network bloggers. The 800 or so third party music bloggers (up from 300 earlier this year) that are part of the MOG network are being given free lifetime passes to the new service.

The email below was sent to MOG network bloggers and forwarded to us. We asked MOG if the deal will apply to new third party bloggers as well, and they say it will. So if you have a music blog and want free music for life, here’s your chance. Just note that MOG has to approve all blogs before they get into the network, so it has to be the real thing.

The email is below:

Subject: MOG has chosen you to receive a “Platinum Ticket” to MOG ALL ACCESS

Dear MMN Partner,

It’s a big day, indeed. After years of brainstorming, we’re proud to officially announce MOG ALL ACCESS, a revolutionary music service set to launch in just a few weeks.

This is a music listening service that gives you access to just about every album and song you can imagine, on demand, in one all-you-can-eat outlet. The user interface and discovery features are unmatched; we’ve got millions of songs from thousands of labels; and the adjacent radio service is something you just need to experience to believe. It comes with interactive playlist functions, playlist sharing tools, and much, much more. We’re music nerds, and we know what nerd s want. Believe me; it doesn’t get any better than this.

The fee for this service is going to be $5 a month. BUT WE’RE GIVING YOU LIFETIME FREE ACCESS AS AN MMN MEMBER!!!!!!!!! This “Platinum Ticket” is ONLY available to MMN partners. CONGRATS!!! We do ask that you use ALL ACCESS to make killer playlists with the service. Playlists are shareable amongst members so the more you make the better the service. This is all we ask in return. A few a week to share the love. Additionally, we’ll soon be announcing you how can provide these playlists on your blog. Stay Tuned.

What about when you’re walking around? No problem: we have a mobile component coming out later this year that will allow full, on-demand listening through mobile devices like your iPhone and Blackberry. Now, since our fee to the labels is steep on this part, it won’t be free when it launches, but we’re arranging a steep discount for MMN partners.

We can’t wait to show it to you. Watch this space for news on a full-access free trial in the coming weeks. And, for the full lowdown, read the press release below, and check out just a small segment of the coverage that’s come out below.

Peace Out,

David Hyman

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Sounds great, except users can listen to streaming on demand music for free today at MySpace Music and Spotify, which is preparing to launch in the U.S. Will MOG’s user experience be so compelling that users will pay $60/year for something they can get free elsewhere?

In January we first heard MOG’s plans for the service. At the time it sounded compelling – it combined a great user experience with a free streaming model. But the crucial part of that service has vaporized – it’s no longer free. And non-free music subscription services don’t work, despite years of attempts by major companies and startups alike.

We’ve championed MOG in the past, but this looks like yet another music failure to us. Too bad the labels didn’t agree to a pure revenue split, which is what CEO David Hyman was hoping for back in January.

MOG has raised around $12 million to date from Menlo Ventures, Simon Equity, Universal Music Group and Sony Music, among others.

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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.

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Mog, a music-centric blogging network that launched back in 2006, is evolving once again. The site has relaunched its homepage at Mog.com to serve as an authoritative destination site for music news. It has lofty goals, aspiring to become something akin to a ‘Huffington Post for music’ with a constant stream of content that lures visitors to come back multiple times a day. Coming up with that much quality content isn’t normally easy or cheap, but MOG has at least one ace in the hole: its entire editoral staff consists of only six people, and its contributing authors aren’t getting paid – they’re just writing about what they love.

MOG has built up a thriving network of bloggers over the years, who produce upwards of 5,000 music-related blog posts a week. Most of these bloggers are found on MOG itself, using the site’s own publishing tools to share with other members (called MOGers). The site has also forged deals with around 300 external blogs, driving traffic to them by syndicating portions of their content on MOG in return for allowing MOG to serve as their ad network. Between all of these blogs, MOG sees around 5.7 million unique visitors and 40 million page views a month.

Before now, MOG has largely failed to capitalize on its expanding base of bloggers – users browsing its homepage would be shown the most recent posts, with no system present to filter for quality or subject matter. As the site has grown, this stream of posts has become nearly unusable (some of MOG’s 5,000 posts are not written by particularly adept writers), which had led to a poor user experience. To put it bluntly, nobody ever really visited the MOG homepage again after seeing it for the first time.

Now MOG is looking to take advantage of the content its users are producing. The new homepage features around two dozen widgets, each of which will focus on a different topic in music news. A handful of these – namely the top news stories for the day – will always remain at the top of the page, but users will be free to rearrange or remove the remainder of the widgets, which focus on topics including album reviews, upcoming music festivals, and must-see music videos. Each of these is created by the site’s human editors, who cull through posts on the MOG network and pick out the best ones, tweaking the headlines as needed to appeal to a large audience.

Beyond the homepage, users can now browse through a section dedicated to other blog posts, but unlike the old system (which forced users to wade through junky content), stories will now be surfaced using an algorithm based on the popularity and reputation of their writers. Users will also be able to vote up their favorite posts, giving less established bloggers a chance to make it to the spotlight. The interface is getting an overhaul to match its impressive (but still mythical) music streaming service, which is still in the works but will not appear for at least another few months.

MOG isn’t going to be the only company vying to be the music world’s news site of choice – competitors include sites like Pitchfork and Stereogum as well as old standbys like Billboard. But MOG has a leg up on more traditional sites because it has such a large flow of new content that it can provide without hiring a team of dedicated writers. So even if the road to popularity is long, MOG can probably just sustain itself until its competitors die out.

In honor of the site’s relaunch, MOG has also put together a rap battle song (embedded below), written by founder David Hyman and performed by Sam F. And while I’m no rap critic, it’s not half bad.

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MOG has a history of doing cool new things around music. The service today includes a media player plugin that records and analyzes your music habits, a website that has a dedicated page for every artist, album and song with user generated reviews and posts, and an advertising network that provides revenue for 300 top music blogs. Users can also stream music via an excellent front end to Rhapsody.

All of that brings about 5 million unique visitors a month to their network, and the company says they should bring in about $5 million in revenue in 2009.

Now they’ve created a new music streaming product that breaks away from Rhapsody and its limitations. Like competitor ilike, which also uses Rhapsody, users can only stream 25 songs per month for free. That doesn’t compete well with free streaming services like MySpace Music, iMeem, Last.fm and others.

The new service, dubbed Mog 3.0 internally, is a fully free music streaming service that lets users play whatever songs they like on demand. The user interface is as good or better than LaLa, a service that we love despite the fact that streaming isn’t completely free. Founder David Hyman and VP Product T Jay Fowler gave me a demo of Mog 3.0 earlier today.

The service combines the ease of use of LaLa with free, which is enough to get our attention. But it also has a recommendation service that rivals Pandora when it comes to discovering new music.

The interface is genius. Users search or browse songs, artists or albums and then start listening to the music. More songs from that artist are suggested and added to the results as you play the songs. And if you move the slider to the right (see image to right), related music is added as well. That lets the user decide if they want a playlist-driven on demand music experience, or to change things up and add Pandora-style related music to the mix.

It doesn’t stop there. Users can also create playlists with the best tool on the market – it’s easier to create and share playlists than even Project Playlist offers, and users can associate a name, description and image with each playlist as well.

MOG plans to make other changes to the service as well, including adding streaming music to content pages, and creating user profiles that highlight the music you listen to and like. It brings in the best social aspects of Last.fm.

The product is compelling.

But it will quite possibly never launch.

MOG has label deals with Sony BMG and Universal locked up. They’ll provide streaming music rights for free in exchange for a revenue share. But Warner and EMI remain on the sidelines, and MOG says they won’t launch unless and untill they have all four major labels under agreement.

I, for one, really hope to see MOG 3.0 launch sometime soon. And if the last two labels don’t jump on board, MySpace should strongly consider buying MOG. MySpace has label deals locked up but their product continues to have unacceptable technical glitches. The music player is very slow to load and songs have an annoying tendency to skip during playback. Perhaps the MOG team can put that right for them.

More screen shots below – top image is the playlist tool, below that is a user profile page.

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Now, a tipster that’s part of the program, tells us that MMN is seriously behind on payments and that they’re raising the payment terms significantly. This is the e-mail he/she received from MOG:

Greetings MMN affiliates,

MMN is now 275 strong. We’re really thrilled with the fantastic response we’re receiving from advertisers. Examples of advertisers MMN has featured in the last 60 days include SanDisk, Electronic Arts, and Sony Pictures. Our sales pipeline for 2009 is massive as a result of the enthusiastic reception to MMN among the biggest brand marketers in the world. They recognize MMN as more valuable, and with a cooler audience, than MySpace, Facebook, Imeem, and others. These marketers get that the tastemakers and influencers live on your sites.

Some of the proof is already in the pudding. MMN has averaged over $5.50 CPM in the last 60 days with 50%+ sell through rates, outpacing many other ad networks.

While demand for advertising on MMN continues to be strong, we are seeing a distinct slowdown in advertiser-issued payments. Regrettably, MOG doesn’t have the luxury of paying out affiliates before advertiser payments are collected. This means that we have to push back our payment terms to 120 days, starting with October 2008 earnings onward.

I ask that you be patient with us as we work to collect your earnings. We’re dealing with cream of the crop advertisers who, I assure you, will pay out.

Thanks for your understanding,

Andrei Marinescu
Director, Business Development | MOG

It reads like a classical corporate message announcing bad news. Start off with the good: tout your member numbers and the ‘massive sales pipeline’, say how special the network really is, boast about your impressive CPM rates, say how much better than competitors you are. Then go on with the bad news, get it over with swiftly and then get to the reassurance part, and never forget to thank the recipient for their understanding in advance.

According to the company’s FAQ, which has yet to be updated, payments were issued within 60 days of the last day of the month in which revenue was earned up until now.

It’s always possible that there is effectively nothing extraordinary going on and that the problems will be solved and affiliates paid out in full, but we wouldn’t be surprised that there’s more to the story here, and that MOG is feeling the sting of the recession like so many other ad networks and publishers are.

MOG is venture-backed: after raising $3.2 million in angel funding, they raised Series A funding to the tune of $2.8 million in April 2008 from Universal Music Group, Sony BMG and The Angels’ Forum. Their total funding is thus $6 million. The company also has legendary music producer and co-head of Columbia Records Rick Rubin on its board.

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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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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.

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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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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.

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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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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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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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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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