MOG brings social networking to music lovers
Social networking is all the rage, and new companies keep popping up that focus on a different aspect of user’s lives. Some enable photo sharing with friends, some focus on travel destinations and blogging, and some have reached out to music lovers who want to share their tastes with friends. MOG is one of the more successful of these social networking sites. MOG is a network that was created by a community of self-described music “freaks” who want to find new music, watch music videos, read news and reviews, and blog about their favorite bands.
Like most social networks, MOG allows users to customize profile pages that reflect their personal tastes. The site is built around the “MOG-O-MATIC”, an application which tracks the music you listen to in a variety of media players. By clicking on the “Magic Button”, you download the MOG-O-MATIC app and it scours your hard drive to discover your playlists and preferences. You can also add songs and artists manually to your profile, and the content you see on MOG is based on these two data pools. The Magic Button can be used to personalize content to you preferences throughout the site. Don’t worry, though. If you don’t want your punk rock friends to know about your secret Dolly Parton obsession, you can remove “9 to 5″ from your profile.
Recommendations are then made either based on the music you put on your profile or review or the songs you listen to in iTunes or download from Rhapsody. Your profile will update your music collection, and display the last songs you listened to and your top artists of the week. Other sections of a MOG page can include concerts you plan to or want to attend, your favorite albums or artists of all time, a personal blog, and a customizable RSS feed. The MOG-O-MATIC technology makes it easy for you to find new music that appeals to your tastes, read news about your favorite bands, and review artists for your friends to see. It can also connect you to other users with similar tastes in music.
MOG has also expanded into video, with the MOG TV section. This is essentially a database of all the YouTube videos for a particular artist or band, for a total of over 400,000 videos. The “Magic Button” also comes into play here, using the MOG-O-MATIC to match the videos it shows to your tastes. You can filter which videos you want to access based on your profile. They’ve also incorporated a feedback system into MOG TV, which allows you to easily report if it shows you the wrong video, bad quality, or a video where embedding is not available.
MOG is focusing on building a community of music lovers who can congregate and discuss their ideas through blogging, reviews, and news. Users can review their newest albums, post their thoughts on favorite songs, and discuss their opinions with other fans. The site is also fast becoming a host for bands where they can post their songs for others to enjoy, a la MySpace. This puts fans and bands on the same plane, and allows them to influence each other in a very open way. Though some genres of music are more represented in the reviews than others, it’s an education in diversity to sift through random blog postings looking for the next big thing that catches your ear. And, of course, MOG’s technology embeds the song being discussed right in the post so readers can experience the music for themselves. That’s quite an improvement over the flowery, unfocused descriptions of songs one sometimes reads in Rolling Stone.
Since social networking is all the rage at the moment, it’s highly likely that some of the new contenders in the arena will not survive the ever-changing winds of Web 2.0 technology. MOG, however, is focused and specific enough in its market that it has a bright future.
As noted by Katherine Boehret of the Wall Street Journal, “MOG isn’t trying to be a social-networking site that enables all things… [it] successfully improves the way people discuss, share, and discover music online.” The new and improved site shows their commitment to enhancements that meet the expectations of users, and they’ve successfully generated a lot of buzz surrounding the relaunch.
By Haley January Eckels