I’ve been using Grooveshark since 2008 and haven’t had much complaints after moving to their premium service a year later. But recently, the disorganization (duplicate tracks, mislabeled or wrongly tagged tracks), plus the very low quality mobile streaming (even on WiFi) has left me searching for an alternative.

Enter MOG.
While definitely not a newcomer to music streaming services, coming from a music-oriented blog and community way back from 2005, MOG is nowadays probably one of the largest industry-backed services of its kind. Their claimed library of 11 million songs is impressive, and from a quick search, I could easily find all but the highly obscure artists or those difficult to license (no Metallica or The Beatles here, but it has some missing from Grooveshark: Pink Floyd, The Chemical Brothers and Korn).
The first thing I noticed is how well organized the music is. No duplicates here, everything is nicely tagged, all albums have high-quality covers and everything is easily browseable.
The other impressive thing when compared to Grooveshark is the high bitrate streams and downloads. Everything is 256-320 kbps, and you can really tell the difference from Grooveshark’s (probably) 96-128 kbps. The albums are flawlessly ripped, no skipping or cut up tracks, the quality is really top notch from what I’ve seen so far, be it on mobile or the site.
Speaking of mobile, the app is highly streamlined with very little eye candy, contrary to Grooveshark’s more intuitive mobile client.
The asking price of $5/mo for web/STB/TV/Roku/Boxee/Sonos streaming is very reasonable. For $10/mo, though, you get the mobile (iOS/Android) clients, which is just $1 more than Grooveshark’s Anywhere. You can sign up for a 14-day trial here.
All in all, I’m very impressed so far with MOG and will be putting up my final impressions once my trial is over.


