On Dec 2, 2009, MOG launched All Access, an on-demand “all you can eat” streaming music service for $5/month. MOG was founded in 2005 by David Hyman, ex-CEO of Gracenote, has 15+ employees and is based in Berkeley, CA. They recently raised $5MM from Menlo Ventures, $1.5MM from Simon Ventures a few months ago and in late April 2008, MOG received $2.8MM from UMG and Sony. Earlier, company raised $3.2MM in two angel rounds.

MOG has struck deals with all 4 major labels, Beggars and Ioda to power this service. Their catalog is supposed to contain over 5M tracks and they report over 10M visitors to their website each month.

MOG’s search feature works like the finder in Mac and auto-completion suggestions on our website – each typed character narrows search results. Suggestions are displayed in categories as you type – artist, album and tracks, along with inline play options for each. You can play songs by artist, tracks in an album, or individual tracks.

MOG’s streaming service is entirely web-based; no client installs are required. You log into their site to access their catalog and your own music library. Their music player is smart enough to detect log in/out state and seamlessly switches between full-length streaming and 30-second samples. From within the player you can buy content, save it to your library (in the cloud) or add it to a playlist. Playlists can be shared with friends on facebook although I did not try this feature.

The play button in the artist category in search (or the artist detail page) kicks off a “slider”-based artist radio feature. On one end of the slider, MOG plays songs only by that artist – all the songs by that artist. This is very cool and interesting they’ve negotiated such an agreement with labels. At the other end, it plays songs by that artist and similar others, much like Pandora. In-between slider settings play various proportions of songs by the artist relative to similar others.

Their artist detail page is quite feature rich. In addition to the artist radio link, they show customers reviews and news (something we don’t support on our store). One can “follow” the artist so they are notified via eMail whenever somebody posts anything about the artist. Artist detail page also shows popular playlists containing tracks by that artist. Finally, the social aspect – you can see users who listen to that artist the most.

MOG’gers or MOG bloggers seem to be their prized value proposition. Apparently there is a huge community of such music bloggers who contribute to reviews and posts on the MOG site. In addition to the social discovery and sharing features mentioned here, one can follow trusted MOG’gers so you see their posts on your home page (a la lala). User profile pages are customizable but I didn’t spend time digging into the specifics.

Playlists are first-class citizens – they are searchable by artist/album/track, sorted, can be public or private, can be shared with social networks (MOG11) and see who is listening to your playlist. Creating playlists is pretty easy and cool with drag’n’drop feature to re-order songs.

MOG is linking to Amazon for the “Buy” buttons. I found links are sprinkled in more places than tracks/albums are available or downloadable. For example, at track level, the buy option is displayed even for album-only tracks. From the player window, the Buy option spawns a keyword search page to amazon that is improperly constructed. There is significant room for improvement if they integrate with the Associates API.

Finally, the lyrics feature that can be invoked through the music player. MOG apparently has 3M lyrics in its database. During my exploration, I couldn’t stumble on any track with lyrics although I played songs by top artists. They did demo the feature in their video. Source of the lyrics is unclear (user contributed vs. vendor provided).

Overall, the $5 price points seems very tempting for the instant gratification of listening to anything that I can think of (in MOG’s fairly sizable catalog), plus the convenience of accessing my music library from any computer. Other competitors (Spotify etc.) are charging more than twice that amount for comparable paid services. MOG doesn’t yet seem to have a similar “portable” experience for devices.