MOG

» see mog.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

MOG started in 2005 as a music blog network. David Hyman, the founder, had run Gracenote, the company that turned the cd-database lookup business into something every media player on earth used. Hyman saw what was happening to the music business in the post-Napster decade and decided MOG should become a streaming service. By late 2009 the blogs had been deprecated and a paid streaming product was the company. The catalog was big and the audio quality was high (320 kbps was the headline number), at $10 a month for unlimited streaming on a phone or a computer.

This was the right product. It was also too early. In 2010 the average music listener in the US was either still buying tracks on iTunes or quietly pirating them. Spotify had not launched in the US yet (that came July 2011). MOG was a small company with a small marketing budget trying to convince people to swap a habit they were not asked to break. Beats Electronics bought MOG in July 2012 for around $14 million and used the music tech as the foundation for Beats Music. Apple acquired Beats in 2014. MOG was switched off on May 31 2014 to consolidate users into the Beats Music subscription, which itself became Apple Music a year later.

i did not subscribe to mog. it was a US-only paid service, and turkey in 2010-2014 was a market where unlimited streaming for a monthly fee was not yet a normal consumer category. the music software i actually used in that period was winamp and last.fm scrobbling, not a us subscription product. mog ended just as spotify started reaching markets that were not on its launch list, which is roughly when streaming became something everyone i knew used.

~ the record ~

~ the product ~

MOG had a catalog of about 16 million tracks at peak. The standout features were variable bitrate (you could pull 320 kbps if you had the bandwidth, which most people in 2011 did not) and a "radio slider" that let you set how far the algorithm could wander from a seed artist. There was also genuine editorial coverage carried over from the old MOG blog days, which most pure-streaming competitors had skipped. You set the slider near the artist and the radio would play the artist plus close neighbors. You moved the slider toward "discovery" and it would drift wider into related styles. That slider was a pretty original idea in 2010 and it is the kind of control most modern services have abstracted away.

~ what beats wanted ~

By the time Beats Electronics bought MOG in 2012, Beats was already a culturally enormous headphone brand and Jimmy Iovine was looking for a streaming service to wrap around the hardware. MOG had the engineering and the licenses, plus a catalog Beats could rebrand quickly. Beats kept the technology and rebranded the product as Beats Music in January 2014. The MOG product was given a 60-day notice period and shut down at the end of May 2014. Subscribers got a free trial of Beats Music and a refund for any unused MOG time.

Apple bought Beats less than a month before MOG was switched off. The MOG codebase did not survive long inside Apple either. It became part of the foundation for Apple Music, which launched June 2015.

~ the time-window question ~

If MOG had launched in the US two years later, into a market that already understood Spotify, it would have been a real competitor. If it had launched two years earlier, before broadband was good enough to stream 320 kbps reliably, it would not have worked. It hit the window where the technology was barely ready and the audience had not been told yet that they wanted unlimited music for a monthly fee.

Beats and Apple together absorbed the timing and the team. The brand did not survive the handoff. MOG, the actual word, is a thing only the early-streaming archaeology crowd remembers now.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »