Record labels fund music discovery site MOG [Updated]

April 29, 2008 | Eric Eldon | Comments |

Updated

Some of the early music discovery startups, like Imeem, Pandora, Last.fm and iLike, now have many millions of people using their services every month. MOG, a standalone desktop music player and music fan site perhaps most similar to social network-focused iLike, isn’t too far behind — it has around a million unique users a month, it says.

So maybe the record labels investing in MOG will figure out some interesting ways to help it pull forward. Universal Music Investments and Sony BMG Music Investments, along with The Angels Forum 74, have just put $2.8 million into the Berkeley, Calif. company. That’s on top of the $3.2 million it already raised through two angel rounds.

MOG already has good relations with the music industry, presumably. It was founded in 2005 by David Hyman, the former chief executive of Gracenote, the album data company that is getting bought by Sony for $260 million.

[Update: As one commenter, filtermagnet, says, the MOG desktop application scans your hard drive to find songs and give you recommendations for similar songs you might like. The company's investors now include labels that sue people for downloading music, which makes filtermagnet worried that maybe these labels will use MOG to access their, er, freely downloaded tracks and sue them or whatever. Maybe, but these labels have also recently shown a willingness to partner with others startups, like Imeem, and freely stream songs over the web. I think the labels invested in MOG now in another bid to somehow keep themselves relevant on the web. If anything, it seems they would want to experiment with streaming albums on MOG or other ideas for helping the company attract usrs, rather than scare peoplpe away through creepy spy tactics.]

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • filtermagnet
    I used to have a MOG account and generally liked the service. I really liked blogging about the music I was listening to, and reading about how other people incorporated music into their lives.

    The reason I dropped my MOG account and uninstalled the music client from my computer was because MOG scans your hard drive to find all the music on your computer. In comparison, Last.FM shares the music you play (via iTunes, for example). The difference is, besides the fact that there is some music in my collection I'd rather people not know about (haha), in an era where users are not fully confident of "Big Music's" intentions when it comes to online music and/or litigation, it is unsettling when a music client owned by one of these companies scans the entire contents of your music library, providing you no opportunity to control it.

    In a time where users are experiencing and now desiring more control in their media experiences (all genres), to not provide FULL control is to miss the boat.
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  • I swear, if it wasn't for VentureBeat I wouldn't know about half of the tools I (and my team) use to promote my music. Thanks! :)
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