Ariel Bitran

If there is one truth known to audiophiles it is "there is no free lunch": entering the audio world requires at least a pocketful of lunch money.  The monthly cost for Spotify "Premium" and "Unlimited" is $4.99/$9.99 is not a significant cost for higher quality sound and storage, than would otherwise be available in the free version, especiallly given the access to millions of tracks.

Readers of Stereophile invest a good bit of money into their equipment. It would be somewhat strange for readers to deny themselves better quality music streaming (up to 320kbps) and storage (basicllly, unlimited) for what amounts to 'chump change'.

But, then ,again, stranger phenomena have been known to occur.

john

It's more interesting to me which service sounds better than which has more listeners.  From that perspective, MOG wins in my opinion.  It is all streamed at 320kbps.  Now that they are on logitechs music streamers, I am a happy camper. 

The cover charge and whether or not it is worth it depends a lot on your use.  I like spotify for two reasons. 

1)  The user interface is very easy.  It does not feel like you are playing a radio station the way it does with other services.  Instead, it feels almost like the music is right there on your desktop like you had a huge collection you could take anywhere.

2)  The ease of sharing playlists.  Sharing playlists is easy on the net but having people being able to listen to your list to comment is hard and fraught with legal dilemmas unless you stack your lists with standards.  This makes sharing mixes fun and legal which is all a big wow factor.

For other people:

3)  The social being tied into facebook thing is frickin' huge!  I do not use facebook but everyone who uses facebook and spotify absolutely rave over the connections and ease of use. 

I am thinking about paying for premium for the higher bitrate streams myself because it is so fun to go on to last.fm and share playlists with people. 

But on edit:  The thing that keeps me from paying for spotify is the thing that drives me nuts by so many of these online services.  The bottom tier pay option gives you almost nothing over just using the free service.  The $5 a month option is completely not worth it.  To get any true kick ass cool benefit you have to pony up the full $9.99.    All the options like storage or the higher quality streaming is on the premium level only.   Yuck.

To me being a social butterfly on facebook and all that twitter nonsense is not for me.  As an adult I like MOG, mp3 320kbps streams, squeezebox touch support and lots of the great material that I like listening to.  I tried Spotify and MOG and MOG wins, I don't need a client software to use it on the PC, and my phone is sounding really good on the commute to and from work.  $10 is about the cost of 1 compact disk.  I use MOG about 2 hours a day, and it's a nice way to start the weekend.  Put on some Striborg and I am in bliss.

Now let's see who's first on the lossless streaming, and maybe even high resolution lossless.  they'll get my money too.  I have at least 2,000 compact disks and I like lossless myself.

MOG is by far a nice way to kick back and sample in high quality mp3, but for critical listening there is only CD or Vinyl or lossless downloads if available (right now).

I've had MOG for about a year now - when I signed up there was no free option, but I would've elected for the Primo account anyway. Being able to download as much music as my iPhone can handle that I can listen to anywhere, whether I've got internet access or not, all for less than $10 per month? It's a no brainer.

One of the things that has impressed me about MOG that didn't get mentioned in the article at all is the customer service. If there's going to be an interruption in service for updates, etc., I get an alert in advance. If there's an album I'd like that isn't in the library, I can hop on their support page and send a note, and somebody will get back to me within a day or two. Sometimes they're able to acquire the album, sometimes not, but I always get a considerate response. 

Finally, since MOG has branched out to Facebook, I've enjoyed an increased community aspect to the site. When I open the MOG App on my MacBook, my home page features albums that my Facebook friends have listened to or "like"d. When I listen to an album on my computer, MOG posts it on Facebook, and it's started conversations with my friends. 

I could go on to talk about the high quality streaming, the playlist and radio features, and more. Give MOG a try if you haven't already, and go for the Primo account. It's changed the way I listen to music, and I'll bet it'll do the same for you. 

Nice article, but I really believe Spotify is for the uninformed.  Spotify is the digital Kool-Aid of 2012.  Aside from superior quality and UI; there's one deciding factor... Music discovery.

Spotify has zero music discovery in their native app.  Fanboys have told me to try the new application; which allows you to install various 'apps'.  Sounds great, and I did give it a shot... But your music discovery is limited to last.fm or Rolling Stone magazine.

I don't want to be driving down the highway; browsing a last.fm app.  I want to hit a button and have my own personal radio.  Thanks.

For the Spotify Zombie Nation... Give MOG a try and see what you are missing.

I was a Spotify user and I enjoyed it, but MOG is so much better. I'm into music as a serious listener and the sound quality of MOG is really excellent. The interface is fun and way more intuitive. I've found lots of new music on MOG as well. The MOG radio section is customizable, so you can have it like Pandora if you want, or change the settings.  Top to bottom, MOG is a much better experience for the REAL MUSIC LISTENER !

I find your comparison between MOG and Spotify to be laughable. Based on numbers, Spotify is winning and MOG is unlikely to catch up. Doesn't the same thing apply to lossy iTunes downloads compared to HDtracks hi-res offerings? Does that mean you should promote iTunes over HDtracks because "all your friends are using it"? 

This is Stereophile, where multi-thousand dollar seperates are a dime a dozen. One of these services is very focused on sound quality. The others just aren't. That should be the end of discussion as far as I'm concerned. 

Your sister website InnerFidelity did a comparative review recently and chose MOG over Spotify and Rdio. Computer Audiophile, Sound & Vision, and others have also come to that conclusion. I'm not clear why you seem to disagree based on non-soundquality related issues. 

I tried Spotify but didn't like it. The UI is clunky, and I don't need another clunky desktop music program (*cough, iTunes). And at the free level, the ads and banners are incredibly annoying. Also, while spending a good time constructing a playlist, I returned to find it out of order, and with songs I had previously removed. This turned me off from Spotify completely.

Rdio is a huge step-up, I spend all my time in my computer browser, why not just have a tab open for sampling new music?

However, in the end, MOG takes the cake. While it's UI isn't as clean and functional as Rdio, it has a larger catalog and 320kbps streaming. I'm currently on a free month of MOG (click here and watch the video to redeem it), but I'll probably stick to the basic $4.99 streaming service for sampling music.

I found this thread interesting so I thought I'd give my perspective.  I was a premium user of MOG and I am now a premium user of Spotify.   Using both services I chose the "high quality streaming" option.   In my experience both Spotify and MOG sound essentially the same when using the high quality setting so I find that comments of "better sound" from MOG to be odd although perhaps I'm not hearing a 256k bit rate versus 320k bit rate difference.   My perspective is that this difference is neglible -- both are essentially bad for critical listening compared to the 24 bit vinyl wave file rips that I do while both are fine for music exploration or background listening on a computer for example.

I switched to Spotify for many of the reasons that the author suggests -- its a better experience in terms of the interface (the iPhone app is awesome) and the ability to share and discover music with other people.  With MOG I felt like I was on an island and iPhone app was clunky, with Spotify I'm enjoying trying new music and playlists that friends suggest that I check out and DJs assemble etc..   Although this was possible on MOG it really wasn't the focus and seemed like an afterthought and my friends simply were not jumping into MOG but they have been jumping into Spotify.   

I generally listen to vinyl records recorded to 24 bit wave files using Pure Vinyl and a high end Lyra Delos cartridge, so I consider myself an audiophile.  I also hunt down original vinyl releases to record instead of the recent remasters since I detest the modern overcompression that sucks the living daylights out of the sound.   I only reference this because I think my perspective is that of a true audiophile who puts a lot of time, money, and effort to get what I consider good sound quality.

Those vinyl rips are light years better in terms of sound quality than MOG or Spotify, therefore I focus on those services for "exploration".   As the author suggested, I've been far more satisfied with the exploration of music using Spotify since I can share playlists with people all over the world who have the same musical interest.  It's also a great deal of fun to easily share songs and playlsits with friends on Facebook.   In fact, Spotify is about my only use of Facebook.

So I find the presumption in these threads that MOG has better sound quality as odd and that Spotify users must somehow be uninformed about sound quality.  In my experience they are equally good (bad) when choosing the premium option.   Both are providing highly compressed material and often remastered versions of songs that suffer from poor modern day remastering (I realize this is my opinion).

So I'd encourage folks who really want to enjoy digital music to try ripping vintage vinyl records to 24 bit and choose MOG or Spotify based on exploration of music first and foremost -- whether one or the other is better for exploration really depends on how much interation you wish to have with other people and if you are inclined to use Facebook, even on a limited basis such as I have chosen to use it.

Meanwhile I do hope Spotify / MOG / etc.. continue to improve their sound quality since even for music exploration better sound quality would help --- but even at lossless CD quality I would still consider my primary listening pleasure to be derived from vintage vinyl ripped to 24 bit as those sound far better to my ears than modern day CDs anyway.

Thanks for "hearing" my persepctive, I know of at least one other audiophile friend who came to the same conclusion and switched from MOG to Spotify.