Rewind 2 years and there were no music subscription services in Australia. Turn the calendar to April 2012 and we’re spoilt for choice. US-based music service MOG have partnered with Telstra to bring their 15 million tracks to Australia – soon. Touting one of the largest collections, Radio channels generated from ‘astoundingly accurate suggestions’, 320kbps audio quality and mobile offerings, MOG is certainly playing to win.
MOG, powered by Telstra, will join Zune, Rdio, Songl, NOW to compete for your monthly entertainment budget. Believe it or not, that’s not all, UK-based Spotify is also planning on an Australian release soon. With so many options to choose from, consumers are certainly in the drivers seat.
Each service has a similar, yet different catalogue, different pricing, some have support for all major mobile platforms, some have none. There’s also 3rd party support to consider like integration with your Xbox or SONOS system.
Basically it boils down to this, MOG is arriving late to the game and needs to do something interesting on price. Some music fans already have their favourite service selected and committed to 12 months, others are much more transient. Personally I’m willing to try out all the services and will settle on what works for me.
The great thing about music subscription services is that there’s no lock in like a large DRM’d iTunes library from a few years ago. The barrier to entry is a signup and download of a desktop and mobile app, in other words, about 10 minutes.
You can register your interest in MOG for Australia at http://mog.com/ via EFTM.
