Social Media Now: MOG Music

Good reviews across the blogosphere for the 2.0 revision of social music recommendation site MOG. Kristen Nicole at Mashable has the best recap of the features of the relaunched site   : 

This free service offers a personalized channel of streaming music videos, all based on your tastes. MOG cross references music from your computer and your iPod along with your site activity and the preferences of like-minded users to give you content you’ll want to see. Also taken into consideration are the preferences of your trusted Moggers, which extends beyond your friends to include users whose taste you admire, and even the artists you like.

In addition, MOG has added a “Magic Button.” No matter where you are on their site, clicking the “Magic Button” will give you a comprehensive page of recommendations based on everything MOG knows about you. And MOG’s new features don’t stop there. MOG has added personalized music news, as well as album reviews and concert reviews, found in the “Read” section of their editorial, which is overseen by Michael Goldberg, MOG’s new editor in chief. MOG is also launching an improved Artist page which will feature Wikipedia-powered bios, user-uploaded photos, external links to fan sites, and a compilation of all posts tagged with that artist’s information. Additionally, you’ll see who on MOG is listening most to that artist.

Phwew….It’s taken nearly two years but today’s MOG sounds like a potential category killer, at least that’s obviously the intention of the impressive management team led by founder David Hyman, former CEO of Gracenote and editor Michael Goldberg, who have reportedly raised $1.4 million in seed money.

Eliot Van Buskirk at Wired News’ Listening Post calls MOG 2.0 everything MTV should have become, particularly hailing the ease of use and integration of the new features.

At Techcrunch Nick Gonzalez notes that although directing users towards new music remains MOG’s raison d’etre, its focus is on user generated blog posts not music recommendation algorithms making it more of a destination site than strictly a service like Pandora or Last.FM.

I am certain that social music recommendation is THE future of music marketing. Traditional channels through which music used to be marketed have completely collapsed. Radio is increasingly driven by talk, not music programming, and what music radio does program doesn’t reach buyers of music very effectively, particularly with respect to new music of any genre. And, of course, MTV barely airs music programming at all anymore.

But enormous challenges abound. For one thing the business sector is already enormously crowded. For another thing the ways in which users listen to music today is so multidimensional and personal that it’s hard to create a single service which can reach users across platforms (from iPods to in-dash CD players, from Sonos to Rhapsody), never mind trying to connect users to one another across platforms. Finally, a service like MOG–built as it is around user generated content more than algorithms and automated tracking–will need to lean heavily on those most musically involved users. That’s good I guess, it’s the uber music dweebs of the High Fidelity variety who are always the ones button holing you to tell you about something you just HAVE to hear. But there is a line somewhere between social networking that’s fun and social networking that is a burden. And for most listeners music remains a purely decorative aspect of their lives.

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