MOG Mobile, the much-anticipated mobile application for MOG‘s streaming music service, is officially available for download at the Android and Apple app stores. For $9.99 a month, the free-to-download app gives users access to a library of more than 8 million songs at standard 64 kbps and high-quality 320 kbps bitrates — not just for mobile streaming, but for download as well.
As a current (and happy) customer of MOG’s $5 per month basic streaming service, which does not allow for downloads but which gives you access to the full 8 million song library, I wish there was a similar option for mobile platforms; at that, the amount of bang for your buck that you get with MOG, especially if you listen to a lot of music, is pretty difficult to beat.
Like Pandora, you can use it as a quasi-radio station to passively listen to music by artist or genre; however, the ability to hone in on an album or playlist and not only listen to it streaming but to download it to your phone in one snap is an as-yet unmatched ability. As Gizmodo points out of two of MOG’s rivals, “Rhapsody currently only lets users download playlists curated on the computer, and Rdio’s buffet download service is still in its invite-only phase.” Like Rdio, Spotify still isn’t officially available in the US, although in March it announced its intentions to do so in three to six months. Clock’s a-ticking.
MOG fans have waited for its mobile debut since MOG All Access launched in December, and while it isn’t perfect — TechCrunch, Giz, and GigaOM have all found minor gripes with it — it is a platform worth getting excited about, especially for music lovers who yearn for a third path between perilous illegal file-sharing and iTunes’ expensive a la carte.
