MOG offered me a free trial to its subscription-based streaming music service, MOG All Access, which launched on Tuesday. The service costs five bucks a month, and gives you unlimited on-demand streams of more than six million songs from all four major labels and plenty of indies. The site is trying to differentiate itself from competitors like Rhapsody and Napster with high-quality streams--all songs are 320kbps MP3s--and some fairly sophisticated music discovery features, like playlists posted by musicians (David Byrne got the featured spot on the day of launch) and other fans with similar tastes to yours ("Moggers like me").
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I've been sampling the service for about an hour, and I do appreciate the sound quality (although better volume-leveling between songs would be nice) and recommendation services. And I'd like to thank the designers personally for the ability to add any song to the already-playing queue--a feature I love on Grooveshark and my Zune HD and that I always miss whenever I use one of my iPods. But there's one big problem: song selection.
Because MOG is licensing content directly from copyright owners, there are big gaps from artists who simply don't want to participate in online music. The usual suspects like AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, and the Beatles are mostly missing in action. There are also strange gaps elsewhere. For instance, half the songs on the Pixies' "Surfer Rosa" are unplayable. Compared with Grooveshark, which relies on user-posted content, MOG has too many holes. And of course, Grooveshark remains free (although a $3/month subscription gets you a version without advertisements).
Song selection could improve over time as MOG signs more licensing deals, but I found some other related glitches as well. For instance, '70s folk artist Roy Harper, whom I often use as a test case to see how well an online service does with relatively obscure old content, has almost no playable content, but does offer a nice list of albums with links to Amazon. The only problem: when you follow the Amazon link on unplayable songs, it takes you to the Amazon Music front door--most of his songs aren't available for download there, either.
In its demonstration video, MOG touts its online radio service as a unique feature. When you're playing a particular artist, a slider lets you control how much variety you want, from "play only songs by this artist" all the way up to "play mostly songs from similar artists." It could use some fine-tuning, however. When I started a queue with a Modest Mouse song, it used Modest Mouse as the basis for its selection. Fair enough, but when I added songs by Talking Heads and Public Image Limited, the radio algorithm didn't account for those artists. It simply switched my radio playlist completely when the new songs started playing, showing all Talking Heads songs, all PIL songs, and so on. Pandora and Slacker do a much better job of creating custom stations based on multiple artists. (Although, of course, those services don't let you play individual songs on demand.)
Finally, as I wrote last week, I still think MOG's lack of mobile support is a fatal flaw, but one that could be easily remedied: Apple's approved iPhone clients for subscription services Rhapsody and Spotify, so why not MOG?
All of these flaws can be fixed, although licensing content takes time and convincing. I'm a big fan of competition, though, and MOG takes many of the best features of a lot of other services, combines them in one place, and improves on some of them. For that, the company should be commended.
If free ad-supported music services aren't going to make it financially, what about paid subscription services? Rhapsody and RealNetworks continue to soldier along, but RealNetworks is apparently looking for investors to take some portion of the Rhapsody business off its hands, and we haven't heard much about Napster since Best Buy, which acquired it a little over a year ago, slashed subscription prices in May in a bid to build membership.
A new subscription music service is coming next week.
Soon, there will be another competitor in the market: MOG. The company has offered a kind of music blog site with a social-networking spin for a couple years now. On Monday the company announced it will launch MOG All Access, a new subscription service, on December 2. At $5 a month, the price will match Napster's, only without the minimum 3-month commitment that Napster requires.
MOG has been teasing the service with videos for a couple of months now, and the latest demonstration video looks pretty appealing. Fast search will show results as you type, and you'll be able to create and save playlists, which will then appear in other users' search results (for instance, if you create an all-shoegaze playlist, it should show up when I type "Boo Radleys Curve Slowdive"). There's also a social-networking aspect: you'll be able to create profile pages which will display information such as the last song you played, and add other users as "trusted sources" to get their recommendations--very similar to Microsoft's Zune Social.
There's also a radio feature that trumps every other online radio service I've seen. You can enter an artist, such as the Dead Kennedys, and it'll begin playing songs only by that artist; unlike most other online radio services, you'll be able to see the queue and move to any song in it. If you crave more variety, you can have the service add related artists to the mix in a fashion similar to Pandora or Zune Smart DJ.
All this sounds like a valiant effort to move the subscription market forward, but lack of a portable story is a big drawback. Rhapsody To Go is available on the iPod; Microsoft gives you its own alternative for the Zune. Still, I've signed up for the beta and will be testing it out as soon as I can.
Microsoft is banking on multitouch support as one selling point for Windows 7, and HP--traditionally a loyal supporter of Microsoft's consumer strategy--is helping the push by releasing an update to its TouchScreen PCs.
The touch-enabled version of Rhapsody for HP's TouchSmart PCs lets you search by writing an artist's name on the screen.
HP has worked with several partners to create touch-enabled versions of various consumer entertainment apps, including Hulu, Netflix, and Pandora Internet Radio, but hard-core music fans will probably be most interested in the touch-enabled version of Rhapsody.
Among the cool features: you'll be able to write the name of an artist directly on the screen, and Rhapsody will take you to that artist's page so you can begin listening to their songs. (Check out the video demo on RealNetworks' blog.)
More generally, Rhapsody remains one of my favorite subscription-based services, with a great selection and strong editorial content. While my other favorite, Microsoft's Zune Pass, offers a slightly better deal with 10 free downloads per month in addition to unlimited streaming, Rhapsody works with Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch. The Zune Pass does not.
Unfortunately, the TouchScreen only comes with a 14-day free trial, which seems a bit paltry: earlier this month Dell announced it would ship some new consumer laptops with a one-year free subscription to Napster, which includes the right to download 60 permanent files over the course of the year.
I love covering music software because the pace of evolution is so fast. I guess everybody's looking for the next billion-dollar business (after iTunes) to help replace declining CD sales.
Last week, I blogged about Spotify, a free and legal music player that offers a massive library of music on demand. Unfortunately, Spotify's library has some big gaps because of legal disputes with rights-holders, and it's not available in the U.S.
A couple days later, software developer David Nelson contacted me about Muziic, a company he started with his dad--he's 15(!) and has gone from public high school to online private high school to pursue this project. After checking it out for a few days, I think it's got just as much of a chance of revolutionizing how we listen to music as Spotify does.
Great selection, but black-on-black doesn't get high marks in most usability tests.
Like Spotify, Muziic offers a free downloadable piece of client software with an iTunes-like interface and offers on-demand access to millions of streaming songs. Unlike Spotify, I had no problem finding huge catalogs from artists that are notoriously prickly about posting their music online, including Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, and Radiohead. It also did a great job with all of my more obscure test cases.
How did an unknown company run by a 15-year-old and his dad pull off this incredible licensing coup? Easy--they've basically built a customized front-end to YouTube. Any song that's been uploaded to YouTube is available in Muziic, including a lot of music that isn't available on most commercial services, like the full Pink Floyd's performance at Live 8 and Led Zeppelin's one-off performance in 2007.
Unfortunately, a dispute between Warner Music and YouTube earlier this year means that a lot of recordings owned by Warner are no longer available. But in a lot of cases, users have filled the gaps with (probably unauthorized) recordings from the artists--so while I can't get my favorite studio recordings from Neil Young or the Flaming Lips, there are dozens live nuggets from each of them.
With any luck, Warner and Google (YouTube's parent company) will resolve their dispute and these gaps will be filled. In the meantime, the Nelsons can work on some of the fit-and-finish problems I found with Muziic. The Web site doesn't render properly in Firefox 3.0. The high-quality audio option didn't work for me--I think it's supposed to render YouTube's default Flash audio into AAC on the fly, but the description doesn't make much sense so I can't really tell. (The default audio sounded fine anyway--at least no worse than MP3, which of course isn't so great.) They could use some professional design help--I couldn't maximize the player to fill the screen, there's a lot of unused space in the margins, and the black on black toolbar sliders are awfully hard to use for those of us who have no patience to download different skins.
Overall, though, this is a pretty interesting and impressive piece of work. Muziic also offers an encoder that apparently lets you upgrade your MP3s before uploading them to YouTube--I didn't test this as I'm more interested in listening than sharing, but I'll give it a look later this week and let you know what I think. More important, Muziic (and Spotify) are finally showing the world how compelling a free, legal, on-demand music service can be--nearly a decade after Napster introduced us to the concept.
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Repeat after me: it's just a rumor. Record company sources deny it. But if the anonymous tipster who e-mailed Mac Daily News is telling the truth, and Apple is indeed going to offer an all-you-can-download iTunes subscription service for for $129.99 a year (or $179.99 a year with Mobile Me), other subscription services will have a hard time surviving.
Let's review for a moment, shall we?
eMusic.
Cost? The cheapest plan $143.88 per year, but only for 30 downloads per month. No unlimited plan available.
Works with the iPod? Yes, because the downloads are non-DRM-protected MP3s.
Chance of survival? Only with price cuts and a more generous subscription plan.
Zune Pass.
Cost? $179.88 per year.
Works with iPod? No.
Chance of survival? Yes, but only because Microsoft seems committed to losing money on the Zune for as long as it takes to make a dent in Apple's market share, and will probably follow with a price cut.
Rhapsody to Go.
Cost? $179.88 per year.
Works with iPod? No.
Chance of survival? Slim. Subscription-music fans tend to like Rhapsody, but once there's an alternative that costs less and works with the most popular MP3 player in the world, I imagine a lot of those fans will reconsider.
Napster to Go.
Cost? $179.40 per year.
Works with iPod? No.
Chance of survival? Given all the other problems Napster's already facing, an iTunes subscription service could be the last straw.
Napster launched its Web-based MP3 download store yesterday, and it seems to be the latest digital music whipping boy, with negative reviews in several places.
Let me start with the positives. Napster claims the store has 6 million tracks, which is 50% larger than any other MP3 store out there. They do have a single download of "The Promise" by When in Rome, an obscure 1980s single my wife loves but that iTunes will only let you buy as part of the full Napoleon Dynamite soundtrack. I'm sorry, Apple, but I won't pay more than $0.99 to get that song.
Two album results...but we won't show them to you.
(Credit: Screenshot)And of course it must be mentioned that every song on Napster's MP3 store is DRM-free, meaning it can be transferred to an unlimited number of computers and devices and will play in just about every music software program known to humankind.
But I'm afraid that Napster still falls short in interface design--a longtime complaint I've had with the company.
Oddly, the Napster home page still features the subscription service far more prominently than the MP3 store, even though the store launched today and will presumably be attracting a lot of onlookers.
When you do find the store, you'll probably recognize it: it looks an awful lot like iTunes rendered within a browser. Which would be fine if it worked as well as iTunes. Unfortunately, there are a few gaps. First, if you have Firefox pop-up blocking enabled, you have to turn it off. Second, when you get a list of search results, they seem to be listed in a random order, making it hard to find a particular item. (Perhaps they're listed by popularity? It doesn't say.) You can arrange them alphabetically, but it takes some hunting and clicking--some of the headers are clickable, some aren't.
Then, there are just some general bugs. For example, when I searched for the new Nick Cave album, Dig, Lazarus, Dig, I got a green bar showing me that two album results were available...but the screen for the results was strangely blank. (See the screenshot.) Huh? Another glitch: when I conducted a new search, sometimes it ignored the changed search terms and re-ran the previous search.
I also ran into the "this MP3 is not available" debacle that this Ars Technica reviewer describes--in this case, it was for a Pink Floyd album I was particularly excited about downloading, an obscure 2005 re-release of two songs from a 1968 movie called Tonight Let's All Make Love in London. But although the album showed up in my search results with a little "MP3" tag next to them, the MP3s aren't actually available for purchase. Insane.
Three years ago, when Napster and Microsoft were close partners, Napster was one of several music stores whose interface was embedded in Windows Media Player 10. I tested it along with some other Windows Media-based stores, but I found the service hampered by a nearly unusable interface. ... Read more
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