THE LOSS FOUNDATION BLOG

I’ve been a big fan of Spotify since it came out in the States in July ’11. I’ve been a paid subscriber almost since day one, and it’s changed the way I listen to music just about as much as MP3 tech did fifteen years ago. The vast majority of my music listening is done on Spotify now, particularly in the car. But my enthusiasm for Spotify has been waning recently for several reasons, most of them centered around decreasing usability of its mobile client… and when I heard about its competitor MOG, I thought I’d give it a serious go to see if it could make me happy again.

There aren’t many (actually, any) truly useful or detailed comparative reviews of these two services out there, and since signing up for either one on a mobile device requires taking the serious step of handing over your credit card, I figured maybe someone ought to take this task seriously. Thusly, the following are my typically detail-oriented conclusions in comparing these two services, because I am the world’s biggest proponent of outlining first-world problems.

 

Preamble and disclaimers: Since everyone uses tech and listens to music differently, a few caveats must be trotted out. I am mostly interested in the Android clients / behavior on both services, because most of my Spotify listening is done via my phone as source. I particularly care about mobile-network performance. I have a Samsung Epic which I’m just about to replace, rooted and running a custom ROM with Android 2.3, and this phone is on the Sprint network. Sprint sucks pretty hard in my particular urban area… although at least it doesn’t suck quite as bad as T-Mobile, and at least it’s not data-capped. But I’m only on 3G here– where I can get even that— and there are plenty of dead reception areas around me where streaming services of all kinds have issues getting through to my phone via Sprint’s data network.

Many of my reception-related issues– load times, etc.– could be rectified by downloading files to my phone from either service (both services allow this quite easily in their own native “unhackable” formats). I will not address this capability, as I am only interested in these services’ streaming abilities. That’s what I pay them for. If I want to go to the trouble of actually downloading an album, I will do so in a non-proprietary high-quality format like FLAC, and listen to it on a device that is more purpose-made for audio playback than a cell phone. The whole reason these services are worth paying for at all is their ability to pull up records from a vast library on a whim, no waiting, no muss, no fuss. So, yes, you can download stuff via your at-home wifi on both Spotify and MOG and never worry about load times or tracks that refuse to buffer quickly or data caps. I’m not concerned with that. I care how well it streams.

Note that I only tested the Android mobile clients, also, because I do not have an iPhone and will never own one. iPhone users may have a different experience from mine, or they may not, but either way, I don’t particularly care. Post your own experiences in the comments if you like, and I will try not to laugh publicly at you for buying an iPhone.

Finally, in popular-music realms, I’m also a hardcore album listener and have what you uhhhh might call “strong contempt” toward those who listen primarily to singles, self-made singles mixes, or algorithmically-/statistically-driven “Internet radio” services like Pandora. This somewhat old-fashioned bias must be clearly explained upfront, because I will be measuring both clients and services against the deepest, most inviolable fundamental tenet of my own personal religion, to wit: you either take listening to music somewhat seriously and take pains to listen to the album in correct original sequence as the artist obviously intended, or you can go jump in a lake, preferably one with very strong undertow. Accordingly, your mileage with these streaming music services may vary depending on your own (probably incorrect) approach to listening and musical enjoyment.

 

Signup and pricing

The prices for MOG and Spotify are currently the same across the board: free for desktop usage with advertising, ~$5 monthly for desktop usage sans ads, ~$10 for mobile access. Both allow short-term trials of the premium mobile service via Android app installed from the Google Play market, with no credit card number required for the initial mobile trial. (Spotify’s free app-but-no-CC trial period is 48 hours last I checked, although they’ve been offering free 30-day trials from their website with a CC# quite frequently. MOG allows you a full week of mobile trial on app install, with another free month given to you if you should let that week elapse– long as you give them a CC# at that point.)

Audio ads are much less frequent and pervasive on MOG’s “free version” than on Spotify, but if you want mobile use you’ll still need to pony up anyway, natch.

Spotify currently uses your Facebook credentials as your login – read: you must have a Facebook account, and hook it up to Spotify, to use Spotify at all. MOG allows you to use a local-only login and password. Read: MOG wins big here. Facebook is stupid, and just needs to die… and I certainly don’t want it being able to see or display what I’m listening to. I annoy my friends enough with my typical FB activity as it already stands.

 

Selection and searching

Both MOG and Spotify have very healthy libraries and usually make it very easy to find what you’re looking for, with one-press breakdowns by artist / album / track per query. It’s sort of surprising how much mainstream stuff is available to stream day of release on both services– or, at least, it’s quite surprising to me as a Netflix streaming user.

Largely, the quasi-mainstream selections available on both services are 99% the same. There are a few predictable omissions if you know anything about the music industry; for instance, you’re not going to be able to listen to perennial industry mega-cash cows like the Beatles, Metallica, Led Zep, or AC/DC on either service (…although over-the-hill stoners may be interested to know that MOG mysteriously has nearly all the “important” Pink Floyd albums that Spotify completely lacks).

Once you get out of current-major-label-product-town, some real differences in selection availability can readily be seen. As a general rule, MOG users seem to have somewhat better chances of finding out-of-print and obscure, older indie stuff that Spotify doesn’t always have. This is hardly a rule, and I certainly found my share of OOP stuff on Spotify that was nowhere to be seen on MOG. But MOG does seem noticeably more likely to have obscure stuff that was truly self-released and/or put out by a label that is owned by the artists themselves (as evidenced by comparing the records available from Negativland, Severed Heads, and/or the Dead Kennedys on both services– MOG has so much from these artists that Spotify just doesn’t).

After doing tons of careful searches on both services, particularly as a 90s-indie-rock-lovin’ old fart, I would happily give MOG the overall nod for better selection here… if not for three significant issues:

1) The “hidden grey-out” on MOG. The problem of tracks purposely omitted within albums affects certain records (thankfully, only a tiny minority thereof) on both services. I’ve long noted that Warner products on Spotify tend to have songs over ten minutes omitted from playability. When this happens, they are “greyed out” – you can see the song is supposed to be there, and can even see how long it is, but you can’t play it.

MOG is missing many of the same tracks on affected records (although I found a few indie albums that were largely incomplete on Spotify, mysteriously complete on MOG). The thing is, when MOG can’t play you a track from an album, it won’t show you that it’s missing. It will only show the tracks from that album that it can play.

This is a huge problem for someone like me who is concerned with uhhhh “album integrity;” even if I can’t hear the whole thing, I at least want to be able to see where I really am in the album sequence and have some idea of how much I’m missing. This can get really nasty in some cases; for instance, Sonic Youth’s 2-CD Goodbye 20th Century is missing more than half its tracks on both Spotify and MOG. If you’re listening on Spotify, you can at least see that you’re missing 2/3rds of the album; if you’d only heard the record on MOG, you might think this 140-minute record was meant to be 35 minutes long.

2) MOG’s classical selection sucks… or, at least, searching for classical works on MOG sucks. Searching for incredibly common works by composer and opus, like “mozart k 333” or “schubert d 960,” immediately yields dozens of relevant recordings of those pieces on Spotify. The same query will completely baffle MOG, to the point where you’re lucky if it will return even basic results by the same composer. I’m sure it has at least a half-dozen recordings of K. 333 available… but good luck ever finding them. 20th- / 21st-century concert music selection is also either completely miserable or completely unsearchable. I suspect it’s probably just a pervasive search-algorithm problem here too.

3) Actually, MOG’s searching sucks in general for anything that’s not by a singular pop artist or band (and even then…). Although it’s not what I would call compelling listening, I dare you to just try and find the Singles soundtrack on MOG. I tried six differently worded queries– dead end each time, even though Spotify has it (although half of it is greyed out / unplayable), and I’m pretty sure MOG does too. Oh, then do a MOG search for Isis; enjoy trying to figure out which of the nine artist results for “Isis” contains the particular Isis album you’re hoping to enjoy.

Don’t get me wrong; Spotify’s search isn’t perfect by comparison… and most of the time, MOG’s searching is nicely tuned and pulls up fast / relevant (and appropriately singular!) results. But when it’s broken, it’s hopelessly fucking broken, to the point where you will probably never be able to find what you’re looking for… even though it’s a near-certainty that they have it “in stock.”

Folks who use their mobile clients almost entirely on 3G/4G networks rather than wifi may find it interesting to know that MOG was consistently faster in searches and autocomplete results. The reason is straightforward: MOG’s searching mechanism is more data- / bandwidth-efficient on the network. In my data-consumption tests (more on that later), I found that Spotify’s mobile client used about 2-4x as much bandwidth, both up and down, to execute a simple search vs. MOG for some reason. In repeated tests, a simple one-word query to Spotify often took as much as 100kb worth of download and 40kb worth of upload to complete! I can’t figure out why any one-word plain-text search input should require 40kb worth of input from my phone.

One last bizarre point: The year of release shown on Spotify for a given album is wrong at least 60% of the time, often off by as much as 20+ years. Not even frequent reissues in the industry can always explain these informational anomalies. MOG has this irritating problem much less frequently, although it’s hardly perfect there either– especially with stuff recorded before 1990. (Did you know that Dark Side of the Moon was actually only just released in 2004? Thank goodness those stoners from ’73 had a time machine at their disposal, or otherwise, uh, they might not still be high today.)

 

Album “storage” and retrieval

I’m not big on listening to the same records repeatedly, even when I adore them. There’s just too much good music and too little time, and I personally believe quite strongly that music should never be confused with comfort food. So I would say that 80-90% of my Spotify listening over the last year has been stuff I’ve never heard before, and often know very little about before I listen.

This is how I like to use Spotify: I hear about or think about an album I’ve never heard and would like to check out. I search for it, then make it its own playlist, and listen to it later (sometimes weeks later) when I’m ready to sit down and give it my full proper attention. This is easy enough to do on Spotify; there’s a button that makes an album into its own discrete playlist with one click in both the desktop and mobile clients.

One problem I’ve had with Spotify lately: Although I constantly delete album playlists, getting rid of a record right away once I’ve heard it, queues like this tend to build up over time. So I probably have 200 playlists (or, if you will, “albums in the queue”) currently up on the Spotify cloud. The Spotify mobile client doesn’t seem to cache my list of playlists at all, and has to load it entirely “from scratch” each time– even if I have just been listening to a record in Spotify and haven’t even closed the mobile client.

Lately, this process of Spotify playlist-loading– a prerequisite for doing any of the listening I want to do– can take upwards of 2-3 minutes over 3G. I can’t even look at recent additions to the “album queue,” let alone play them, until Spotify gets the complete list of my ‘lists off the central server. This is incredibly annoying, and was my main inspiration for trying MOG to begin with.

MOG handles things a little differently in terms of streaming-album “storage”, at least semantically. Making an album into a playlist is not an easy one-button operation. So to get things to work the way I’m used to working, I had to use MOG’s “favoriting” system instead. This is a one-click operation once you’ve found an album you want to store for later playback. It seems a little weird to “favorite” an album I’ve never even heard, but whatever.

From the MOG mobile client screen, there’s a button for “My Favorites,” which then lets you choose whether you want to see your favorited artists / albums / tracks. So that’s all easy enough as well.

But there’s a problem – a big one. Spotify’s playlists are generally displayed in the client in order of creation, with the most recent playlist additions at the top. This isn’t ideal, but it works.

What doesn’t work is the unchangeable list order in the MOG mobile client for favorite albums– it lists them in alphabetical order by album title.

Look… I am often decent at remembering artist names, but I’m an increasingly old fart, and damned if I am ever going to remember the title of their brand new record on the very first encounter– which is usually the exact point at which I’m adding it to my listening queue.

To give MOG a chance at besting Spotify’s painful queue-display times, I first loaded up my MOG favorite-albums list with exactly 100 records, so it would be a sort-of fair comparison in terms of loading times when I took the phone back onto a 3G network for real-world testing. A lot of the records I chose were either brand new albums by artists I kinda like, or they were records by artists I don’t really know that well to begin with. There were at least three new albums on that list by personal-favorite artists that I just had to hear right away.

But when I went to go load the list of favorites on the phone, I discovered the alphabetization-by-record-title issue, and trying to find those three particular records in the list of 100 albums was just about impossible– because I didn’t know what the albums were even called. I searched in vain for a way to sort the favorite-albums list by artist or even by date, but it doesn’t seem to exist.

This situation alone is basically an immediate dealbreaker for me re: MOG, at least until they fix their ridiculous oversight and allow user-selectable sorting basis of favorites lists in the mobile client. I can deal with Spotify’s chronological-addition sorting, even though I don’t care for it. But it’s much easier to deal with that than to hunt line by line through a huge list of alphabetized album titles that I largely don’t even recognize.

Right, but what about 3G load times for all those “queued” records? MOG definitely wins here. Once on 3G, my fresh-faced list of 100 records loaded into the client in under 15 seconds on first access attempt– compare and contrast to the 2-3 minutes of my life Spotify insists on wasting every time I fire it up. And unlike Spotify, the MOG client also appears to cache the basic data about each favorited album once it’s initially been loaded, so that it’s possible to at least select a “stored” record for mobile listening much more quickly than in Spotify. This is, of course, exactly the way it should be. Hey, Spotify guys: Fix this. Now.

 

Actual playback

The main difference between the “playback philosophies” of Spotify and MOG’s respective mobile clients: Spotify seems to want to cater to control-freak / purist album-only listeners (like me), while MOG seems to want to cater just a bit more to the singles, party-mix and Pandora-loving crowds (…bloody infidels, may they all die a million painful deaths to the sound of Justin Bieber throwing up on Lady Gaga). No, it’s not that it’s not easy to listen to a full album on MOG; it’s just not quite as easy to do so as it is in Spotify.

One big reason for this is MOG’s organization around a play-queue system. The queue perpetually gets in the way of correct album listening, and its centrality in playback always means at least three more button presses than Spotify requires to get a given job done. If you’re tired of a particular album in Spotify, just click on the next one in your playlists, and it starts playing right away. If you want to achieve the same in MOG, it requires heading through a few context menus to clear the playback queue of the previous record.

Making the queue-based system infinitely more annoying is MOG Radio, which is nothing but a nuisance and not all that intuitive to turn off in the Android mobile client. Believe me, though, you’ll want to figure out how turn it off if you’re remotely serious about music. Add one album– heck, one track to the play queue in MOG with the Radio feature turned on, and it will auto-magically fill the remainder of the queue with a whole bunch of stuff that, while “relevant” (usually tracks by the same artist), you did not want to hear right now, let alone mixed up indiscriminately with the album whose form you were trying to appreciate in proper linear fashion.

Listen, MOG, if I wanted Pandora, I would just listen to Pandora. And I do not want Pandora… ever. That’s exactly why I keep paying $10 a month for Spotify, for the privilege of choosing music by my own bad self. (Spotify has recently added a few Pandora-like features for the amateur-hour jokers that want them– but they still keep said obnoxiousness well out of the way of us serious users, and certainly not turned on by default.)

Anyway, once you have the MOG Radio turned off and out of the way, MOG mobile is livable. But I’m still annoyed with the queueing system and the slight bit of needless complexity it adds to MOG’s mobile usage for album-listenin’ purposes. The queue should be an option, not a requirement, and it seems incredibly redundant given MOG’s extant playlist functionality.

One biiiiiig problem with MOG: Spotify has quickly (and rightly) figured out that music nerds want gapless playback, and it’s been incorporated in their client for a while now. MOG, for all its “we sure do love audiophiles” marketing, has not figured out that music nerds want gapless playback. Hey, MOG, guess what: I want gapless playback. Not only do I not want to have silences between tracks in contexts where there obviously were meant to be none, I particularly do not want to have a minute or two of silence inserted between tracks… unless I’m listening to a John Cage record, which I can’t find on your broken search algorithm anyway. Oh yeah, but this leads us directly to:

Bandwidth, sound quality, and load times

It might seem weird that I’m throwing “sound quality” in with this category of assessment, but I’m doing so for a reason– this is, after all, a review about streaming music on a mobile platform… and when it comes to streaming music on a mobile platform, you can’t separate the two diametrically-opposed considerations of sound quality and bandwidth consumption.

MOG enthusiasts– and its marketing department– make a big to-do out of that “320kbps CD-quality stream.” My own eyebrows went up when I first read about this. For many reasons (everyone knows 320kbps CBR doesn’t sound any better than -v0 VBR but easily takes up twice as much space / bandwidth; audiophile-grade phone hardware capable of even resolving that much musical detail doesn’t even exist yet; y’know we have these things called DATA CAPS in the US, rite?, etc.), 320kbps MP3 seems like overkill, and mayyyyyybe not such a great idea for mobile usage to boot.

Spotify’s mobile service, for its own part, claims 160kbps on average. Ooh, so MOG’s 320kbps is twice as good, right? Well, I’m pretty sure that Spotify uses its own proprietary lossy codec, making such a numerical comparison impossible… and we could have a conversation about how MP3, particularly CBR MP3 (which the number “320kbps” almost certainly suggests), is perhaps not the best choice of lossy algorithm for streaming music either.

But maybe none of this nerdy stuff matters. I personally suspected that MOG was lying about “true” 320kbps streaming anyway (there’s no way to prove what bitrate the Spotify / MOG stream is actually using inside the black-box client, to my knowledge). So I thought I’d do a few tests, both of sound quality and data consumption in action, best as I was able.

My very first impression of MOG mobile, in an admittedly spotty 3G reception area: “Damn, son, this is some SLOW loading.” It took maybe a full minute or two after the initial “PLAY THIS NOW” instruction from me before I heard the very first notes out of the MOG app. In my experience, Spotify might take ten-ish seconds in the same location to begin requested track playback on 3G.

MOG wasn’t always this bad speed-wise, and often loaded the next track quite seamlessly (save for that unwanted momentary between-track gap that should have stayed behind with the 3g iPods in 2001 or whatever). But if I was in a marginal reception area when the track was changing, one that might slightly frustrate Spotify for 10-15 add’l seconds, well… once again, I’d be waiting a long time for the music to start again on MOG. And around here, I have lots of marginal reception areas.

When I plugged in a data-consumption app and did some testing, a few things became apparent, and the long load times were quickly explained. MOG clearly wasn’t lying about that “320kbps stream” thing. In fact, the downstream data consumption was far greater than 320kbps MP3s would normally consume. Said bitrate should take about 2.5MB per minute of playback. I found MOG to be consuming something like 3-4MB of downstream traffic per minute on average with the client in “high-quality” mode. That means a four-minute song on MOG, all by its lonesome, will use up 13-16MB of that tiny monthly data cap for which you signed up.

I couldn’t believe these numbers, and I tested MOG again and again, rebooting the phone, turning off every other Android process I could– same incredibly wasteful results in the data-suckage calculator each time. No wonder track playback takes forever to start in marginal 3G zones. And, certainly, no wonder Verizon is forcing all their new phones to ship with MOG. They’re hoping to make a killing on data-cap overages from unsuspecting first-time MOG users.

You don’t have to use the 320kbps option on MOG’s mobile client, mind. You have exactly one other option hidden in the MOG settings, and it is… 48kbps AAC+. Really, MOG? Jeez, take your pick, fuel-conscious consumer: a brand new Hummer limousine, or an ’83 Ford Fiesta with 200k miles on the clock.

…Well, OK, MOG’s 48kbps AAC+ doesn’t sound quite as bad as it seems like it ought on paper. It’s probably OK for listening in the noisy car– most of the time. Compared back to back with either the MOG “HQ” output option or Spotify’s mobile output, I know I would definitely not want to use it for listening on a proper stereo, or even semi-cheap headphones. This level of lossiness is pretty much instantly ruinous to cymbals and vocal sibilants, among other things. It’s a significant audible degradation, alright.

Meanwhile, Spotify’s “inferior” 160kbps stream (which is their respective high-quality option) not only beat the sonic bejeebus out of MOG’s 48kbps stream, it sounded pretty much the same as MOG’s high-falutin’ 320kbps option on a good, detail-oriented stereo system with careful, detail-oriented listening. I made a few good lossless recordings through the analog loophole, and honestly could not tell the difference between Spotify and MOG @ 320 most of the time when properly a/b/x’ing the captured samples.

What could tell the difference was my data-usage calculator. The distinction in data consumption between these two apps / services is, again, much more dramatic than the bitrates would suggest on paper. In fact, in repeated testing, Spotify’s 160kbps data stream didn’t take up a whole lot more bandwidth than MOG’s 48kbps option.

Comparison of the downstream data consumed by listening to the same 3’44” song (streamed twice on each option, with phone reboots, extraneous-service turnoffs, and data-counter resets between playings):
MOG 48kbps: approx. 3.2MB
Spotify: approx. 4.6MB
MOG 320kbps: approx. 14.5MB

Clear winner: Spotify. There’s absolutely no sonic reason, with current phone audio hardware being what it is, to pick MOG over Spotify if you’re not listening through a PC with a dedicated / expensive high-end sound card and a crazy good speaker / amp rig all the time. There’s certainly no reason to blow out your painfully tiny 3G/4G data cap with MOG’s dreadfully wasteful use of bandwidth, or suffer through MOG’s excessively long buffering times in marginal reception areas.

Bottom line: MOG desperately needs to rethink their “320kbps all the time” strategy, and maybe meet up with some consultants who actually understand modern-day lossy audio compression (because I dare say that any streaming-media company that is still sold on lossy CBR in general has not, uh, sufficiently explored their contemporary options).

I am not going to sit here and not tell you about Spotify’s tendency to get stuck, buffering-wise, in marginal reception areas as well (there are two dead spots on my five-mile daily commute where I can count on Spotify to desperately choke on the 3G stream 85% of the time). It’s maddening (if not quite as maddening as MOG’s wait times in high-quality mode)… and really, both companies need to base their streaming mechanism on the Netflix model: If the pipe to the end user is getting choked off, there needs to be an immediate variable-bitrate adjustment on the fly, negotiated by the client.

Let the user choose a “high bitrate all the time” option in the settings if they want, that’s fine… but otherwise, I dare say that when it comes to music, most listeners would rather suffer a temporary reduction in sound quality than having to experience a song chopped up phrase by painfully halting phrase as they drive through a reception dead zone. Both companies: Fix this.

 

Not-so-happy conclusion

I would love to switch from Spotify to MOG. Sure, I’m irritated by aspects of its Android client, at least from an album-listener’s perspective. But it definitely makes up for those mild annoyances with a slightly better selection of the stuff I typically listen to, and a much smarter / faster handling of my album “queue” on mobile networks that leads to much less needless “dead air” in the car vs. Spotify’s way-too-slow-loading playlist list.

…Yeah, frankly, despite the MOG client’s quirks, it’s still much less irritating overall and generally faster at many things than Spotify’s current Android client, which has been taking dramatic turns in the wrong direction with each new build. And I very much like that MOG haven’t sold their souls completely to Facebook, unlike Spotify. I’d really rather support them over Spotify for that very smart decision alone.

But right now, even though I’m on Sprint (an officially-uncapped network at the time of this writing), I cannot justify the waiting around for the music to load on the bandwidth-hungry MOG when I hit ubiquitous marginal-reception areas. I can’t get down with their “faster” 48kbps option either, even in the car (because I can still hear the distinct quality difference even there!). I can’t overlook the very serious omission of gapless playback.

The classical search problem– if not MOG’s classical library in general– needs to be fixed pronto, because Spotify is KILLING them there. And I certainly can’t deal with MOG’s totally inexplicable / dumb sorting mechanism of my album “favorites” queue by album title, with no ability to sort by the contents of a different and more appropriate field.

So right now, I’m afraid I’m stuck on Spotify. I’m hoping MOG steps up their game for us album-oriented / mostly-mobile listeners, and will be keeping my eye on them… because I’m ready to switch ASAP when / if they do.

If you’re only wanting to listen on your desktop, and you don’t care much about classical selections, I think MOG is clearly the way to fly at this stage of the game.