MOG vs. Spotify

As I’ve blogged about before, I’m a huge music fan, so I was looking forward to the American launch of Spotify

I have a pretty voracious appetite for music. Financially, renting music makes way more sense for me than buying it. I listen to music pretty much all day at work using MOG. I like to listen through the new releases on Tuesdays, picking out albums to add to my playlist for the month.

Now that I have a few days use out of Spotify, I thought I’d share my thoughts on the two services.

Catalog

By far, the catalog of music available to queue up is the most important factor in choosing a streaming music service.

Before Spotify launched, there were a couple of streaming services in the US, MOG and Rdio. By far, MOG had a better catalog.

Compared to MOG, Spotify’s catalog is fairly strong. I loaded up my ongoing playlist of favorite indie rock for 2011 and tried to match it in Spotify and I found most of the tracks, though not all of them. Notably, The Head and the Heart were missing.

My favorite artist of the last few years: Arcade Fire. Arcade Fire’s albums are available on MOG, but NOT on Spotify.

I also searched for another of my favorites of the last few years, the Decemberists. On Spotify their last 2 albums are available. On MOG, their entire back catalog is available.

When I hear of an album that is coming out in the future that I want to check out, I make a task in OmniFocus with the artist, album name, and release date, and set the item to appear on that date. There have been a few albums that have come out in the last few months that never appeared in MOG, and all of them were available on Spotify, so it’s close to being a push.

Advantage: MOG, but it’s close.

Interface

Desktop

Up until recently, MOG ran in Flash in the browser on the Mac. They’ve only just recently launched a flash free version on the Mac with an improved interface. It’s an improvement, but it is clunky.

Playlist management on MOG is ok on the Mac. You can now drag album thumbnails into a list, but you can’t select multiple tracks in a playlist to rearrange them.

Plus, if you’ll look in the gallery of interface shots below, there’s only a tiny inset window in the MOG interface to get to your playlists. I like to create a lot of lists. It would be nice if I could organize those into folders, which you can do on Spotify.

MOG is working on a desktop client, I’m trying to get into the beta. Hopefully it will address some of these shortcomings.

Mobile

The biggest drawback to the mobile MOG client is the total lack of playlist management. While you can access playlists, you cannot add to them or delete from them on the iPhone.

Spotify also has a nice interface for syncing the tracks you want for when you’re on Edge or offline too. Unlike with MOG, you can even do offline tracks on the Desktop.

You can add to your favorites (MOG) or starred tracks (Spotify) on the mobile clients.

Neither service has a true iPad client.

Overall, the Spotify app is just more polished. When searching, albums are organized by release date. MOG organizes them alphabetically.

Advantage: Spotify

MOG on iPhone's Main Window

Search Results on MOG

MOG in browser on Mac

Spotify Main Window on iPhone

Spotify Search Results

Spotify app for Mac

Social

Social is a big part of the advantage in interface for Spotify. Once you tie in your Facebook account, friends who have Spotify show up immediately in the right column on the Mac. And I was able to see my friends’ playlists and even subscribe to those playlists.

You can copy playlists that are shared on MOG, but it’s not as easy to discover them. You can “trust” other moggers, but I don’t have any people that I knew outside of the online world using it. Because the basic Spotify service is free, I’m sure there will be several dozen people I know on it.

While MOG does have some social aspect to it, it’s not as well integrated.

Advantage: Spotify

iTunes Integration

I’ve pretty much all but completely abandoned iTunes over the last year, but I do have a playlist where I’ve added all of my favorite songs of all time so that I can have those on my iPhone.

With MOG, there was no way to use that playlist to build a similar one. MOG does have a favorites feature and you can favorite tracks and have a list of those available, but I had to start over.

But with Spotify, you can open up iTunes, grab that playlist and drag the tracks into a playlist in the Spotify app. You can play any of those files on the desktop app, but it lets you know which ones it has in its own library by graying out the ones that are not in its catalog. The playlists you create are synced to your account and available on other machines, so I can get all of my old iTunes playlists easily into Spotify. Plus, MOG playlists have a 250 track limit. I have one on Spotify with 1600 right now.

Advantage: Spotify

Radio - (Pandora Style)

I don’t use this feature, but MOG does have a Pandora style radio feature that even one-ups Pandora. There’s a slider that lets you control how much of the artist that the station is based on appears in the playlist.

Advantage: MOG

Audio Quality

Both excel here, unless you’re using the free plan. I don’t know that Spotify has announced what bitrate they’re using, but I know that MOG is 384kbps.

Spotify on the desktop caches audio files, which is good if you have a network admin who doesn’t like you streaming.

Advantage: Even