BUT DO THEY HAVE METAL?
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 at 1:30pm by Vince NeilsteinMetal Insider tells us that brand new music streaming service MOG went live yesterday morning. MOG promises a deep library at a $5 monthly fee, and boasts a service “better than Rhapsody, iTunes and Pandora…combined.” [Full disclosure: MOG's advertising arm sells some ad space on this site.] With all four major labels signed on (those being Warner, EMI, Sony and Universal), a $5/month unlimited streaming service is a tantalizing proposition indeed. But the million dollar question on our minds (and undoubtedly yours as well) is: do they have metal?
Without having tested the service yet I’m inclined to say that, surprisingly, the answer is actually “yes.” Century Media, Nuclear Blast, Earache, Willowtip and a few other metal labels are distributed digitally through EMI, so those ought to be covered. Warner holds a majority stake in Roadrunner so that oughtta be a no-brainer. Relapse, Metal Blade and Victory releases are distributed by Red, which is owned by Sony. Those are all the labels at the proverbial metal big kids table right there. Obviously there are plenty of other smaller metal labels, but I’m guessing most of them also have major distribution.
This new MOG service is interesting indeed. If anyone here has tested it out, please let us know in the comments how it fares metal-wise. How does it stack up against the much simpler, sleeker Spotify? Watch a brief description of some of the service’s key features in the video below.
-VN
13 COMMENTS on “BUT DO THEY HAVE METAL?”
I’m sorry, pay for your site with ads OR charge a fee. To do both is just insulting.
I don’t understand why people get so upset like this. Does the banner ad really bug you that much? It’s not like there’s an audio commercial before the songs.
Agreed.
Yeah, because capitalism is such a bad thing. It’s not like you’re forced to visit the partner sites.
I don’t mind seeing banner ads, it’s just the principle of it. Banner ads are easily ignored, such as on this site. But I pay nothing to view this site, because they make enough money to run it from advertising. However, asking people to pay you on a regular basis when you’re already getting paid enough to stay in the clear is pretty corrupt. It’s the same thing that pisses me off about paying 11 bucks for a movie and then watching 20 minutes of commercials (not previews). Organizations make tremendous amounts of money from advertising, so if they advertise there’s absolutely no reason to charge a fee. Advertising alone is enough to keep youtube and facebook going, as well as run free daily newspapers. So paying for a service that more than likely equals youtube and facebook in cost is not something I’ll ever do.
No, most companies, if they’re run properly, create a business plan that includes a determination of a reasonable profit margin and a pricing structure that will meet that requirement. For you to state that, “Organizations make tremendous amounts of money from advertising” is extremely uninformed and naive. As for your analogy to movies, I also find those pre-trailer advertisements to be extremely annoying, but consider that if those ads didn’t run, your $11 ticket would probably be $13. And knowing that a movie has 15 minutes of ads + trailers, you can always show up late and skip them. (However, where I live a movie ticket is $9.)
I’m just saying that if advertising can completely pay to make a newspaper every single day or to run facebook, both of which are tremendously expensive endeavors, then it can also pay to run this service. I think they’re trying to get rich. And as for your calling me naive, you obviously have no knowledge of advertising or business if you think there isn’t an absolute goldmine to be found in advertising space alone.
SourDeez: you’re forgetting the fact that MOG needs to pay to license all that music, whereas a site like MetalSucks has an operating cost of next to none. For MOG to license all that music is EXPENSIVE… they need all the income they can get to cover those costs PLUS the operating costs of all of MOG’s staff. All we have to do here is pay for server space (cheap) and then just make sure we have enough to live on. It’s apples to oranges.
And you said that all well-run businesses create plans just to meet their requirements. So you basically said that there’s no greed in business. Most businesses make a concerted effort to make considerably more than enough to meet a profit margin. In layman’s terms, I don’t want to pay for someone’s BMW.
Yeah I wasn’t really thinking about that. Licensing music is pretty fucking expensive.
last.fm is my music listening service of choice. You can’t save music or whatever, but you can listen to so much for free and if I like it, I’ll just download it.
But 5 bucks a month is a pretty good price.
Just wait until spotify launches in the US.
Better than Pandora, eh? They’ve done pretty well with some of my extremely obscure requests so far.