MOG

I stayed up til 2am comparing streaming music services. Oh boy.

Decided, in the end you can’t beat http://mog.com

Beats Pandora (you can pick your own songs). Beats rdio (song selection, audio quality). 

I used Pandora for something like two years and might keep a subscription around just for music discovery (it’s really cheap anyway…). After a while it just plays the same stuff over and over, though, so I really wanted something like Grooveshark but less chaotic/shady. It came down to MOG and Rdio.

I tried listening to a variety of music on each - blues, classic rock, Katy Perry, even some classical. MOG streams 320kbps MP3s, while Rdio deflects any questions about its streaming format with “it’s CD quality!” It’s bullshit. I tried listening to some classical music and either Horowitz’s piano was broken or the compression ruins everything. The same song was fine on MOG. Song selection is usually better on MOG too. 

The interface is clunky and takes a few tries to figure out, but I really love the radio feature. It’s not as technically impressive as Pandora’s algorithm, but the idea’s the same - pick an artist, and it’ll play songs by similar artists. You can also edit the list, save it as a playlist, thumbs up/down, etc. Rdio’s radio is much weaker - you can make it include recommendations, but there’s no real control (e.g including more of the original artist, rating songs…) They both have artist recommendations based on similarity and what not, but anyone can do that on their own without paying $5 a month. 

Lastly, they both have social features that I don’t really care about. I did like Rdio’s a lot more - you can see what your friends are listening to, collaborate on playlists, in general it seemed like a much more polished part of the site. At the same time it doesn’t have any substance. You might as well be looking at a twitter feed of their song titles. I think MOG tries to encourage people to write a little more and create actual content. Not that I’m gonna get off my lazy ass and do it, but it’s nice to see someone put some thought into a blurb for a playlist or an album review. 

Rdio is a sexy, sexy site compared to MOG. I don’t think either of them are as polished and usable as Pandora, but Rdio’s definitely closer. If only the sound didn’t suck and radio were useful…oh wait, that’s pretty much their entire product. They also definitely had me swayed by the fact that my friends were on it, but hopefully now they’ll switch… 

1 year ago  /  2 notes