Those who’ve read my post called “The New Now of Music” know how I feel about the future of music. Although I’d like to believe in Sandy Pearlman’s “paradise of infinite storage” and his 5 cents ownership solution, I believe that the people will instead opt for cloud-based streaming even if that means embracing a non-ownership based model.
I have always contended that I would LOVE to pay for a music service that offered me ALL the music of the world, at HIGH quality, available ANYTIME & ANYWHERE (including the NYC subway, which has no wifi or 3G coverage).
I’ve tested some services like Last.fm and Pandora and I like their music discovery features however the quality of the streams and/or the lack of caching support in their iPhone apps were deal breakers for me. I’ve had a chance to test the desktop version of Spotify (whose iPhone app does support caching) but as we all know they are not yet available in the US. As of last week I started testing out MOG. Although their 7 million strong catalog is not as ‘total’ as they like to claim and I’ve already managed to query artists or albums that aren’t available through MOG, I am fairly (not totally) happy with their streaming quality AND they are allegedly releasing their cache-supporting iPhone app later this month. At $5 or even $10 per month I could go for that until the competition (and the technology) in this field becomes such that more offerings will become available (everyone is waiting to see what the recent Lala-acquisition by Apple and their plans to offer a cloud-based iTunes version will turn into). I still think that Google might at one point sweep in strong of their technology and marketing presence, but what I am really waiting for right now is how MOG will compare to Rdio, the new (and still secret) service being launched by the founders of SkyPe. When those two do something it’s always big and so I think for now the battle will be between MOG, Rdio and Spotify (if they ever enter the US market). We shall see.
In the meantime my MOG player is streaming all sort of music at 320kbps and the discovery slider already helped me discover some new artists I didn’t know. There is of course room for improvement but right now I really just wanna see the iPhone app and keep testing this until there’s more to test.