• MOG

  Participated · Equity · Apr 2008

  MOG operates an on-demand streaming music service alongside a large network of thousands of music blogs written by its community. In February the company raised another $9.5 million in funding and has mobile apps slated for release this quarter. Quantcast reports the MOG Music Network at 13.2M monthly uniques in the U.S. and 23.7M worldwide. MOG compared its Quantcast numbers with comScore figures for competitors such as MTV Networks Online, Vevo, and MySpace Music. The company says Quantcast likely undercounts its growth because it does not count ‘duped’ uniques across its network. Combining repeat comScore properties, MOG says it ranks as the ninth-largest music portal overall, behind Yahoo’s music properties, though the article cautions the comparisons are not apples-to-apples given MOG’s heavy blog focus and editorial volume. MOG operates a popular music portal and a large network of blogs that publish music news, reviews and curated posts. In April the site launched a redesigned homepage featuring news, reviews and top blog posts. The network includes over 700 blogs producing more than 6,000 posts per week and draws over 8 million unique visitors a month. Existing products are performing strongly while the company has also previewed an unlaunched music streaming product. That streaming preview reportedly had two of the four major labels signed at the time, though MOG declined to comment on remaining label participation. Financially, MOG has raised $12.5 million since its 2005 founding and recently closed an additional $5 million round. MOG operates an online music platform where users can blog about their favorite artists and tracks. It provides a standalone client that detects which songs a user plays on their computer (regardless of media player) and shares listening habits with friends on the site. Since December, Rhapsody has integrated with MOG, enabling users with Rhapsody accounts to play songs mentioned in MOG blog posts directly. The company announced a strategic $2.8M investment from major industry players, indicating label interest in the service. Observers speculate this backing could lead to broader music delivery, possibly a free ad-supported streaming option akin to Imeem, though that remains unconfirmed. MOG’s client-based approach distinguishes it from plugin-based services like iLike. MOG is a social networking site for music aficionados that combines desktop listening-tracking software for Windows and Mac with user and artist pages. Its desktop tracker monitors all music played on a computer or iPod and updates users' MOG pages in real time, using Gracenote wave- and text-matching to map songs and provide 30-second samples. The site displays updates, blog posts, and widgets in drag-and-drop AJAX boxes and enables commenting and social interaction. MOG launched an embeddable Flash music player that lets bands and fans upload and syndicate single-song files, though the player only plays one file at a time and requires a written post; it supports fast-forward and reverse but has no playlist functionality. The player also introduces a revenue stream through song tags that link to purchases on Amazon and iTunes. MOG reports about 20,000 users, roughly 200,000 uniques per month, and is privately funded with approximately $1.4 million in capital; the company positions itself against MySpace Music, myStrands, and last.fm.

No current team members are available.