Meanwhile… I'm Still Thinking

The album-a-day project is working out just fine. As you might’ve noticed, I’ve been trying to listen to any given artist as chronologically as possible, starting with the earliest release that I own. Recently I’ve hit a couple of roadblocks – I have vinyl and tape copies of albums that are all but inaccessible and I just don’t feel like doing the necessary digging in order to listen to them. A temporary solution has been to sign up for Spotify and Mog.

I tried Spotify first, and was really happy with it. Incredibly clean, easy to use and an absolutely huge selection of music. There were very few searches that I did that came up empty, and it was a snap to click on an album, get it into a playlist and start listening. Every so often I’d have to hear an ad, but it seemed like a fair price to pay compared to cleaning the mold off my copy of “Tonight’s the Night”. Because the actual program resides on your computer it is as responsive as can be – actually more responsive than iTunes, which has become clunky for me because I have around 20,000 songs in there. The only real problem with Spotify is that I can’t legally use it in the U.S. – kind of a show-stopper, you know?

Next up was Mog, which gives you a whole free hour to decide whether or not you want to pony up some money for the service. For my free hour I listened to “Knnillssonn”, and the experience was good enough to entice me to spend $25 for a six month subscription. Like Spotify, the music selection is large enough to keep me occupied, but where in Mog’s name is Mike Nesmith? Spotify had him, Mog did not – that’s kind of serious. The user interface is OK – slower than Spotify because it’s web-based, and because there are more moving parts there’s a little more that you need to do in order to find an album and play it. The sound is OK too – not as good as the vinyl or CD would be, but passable… especially when you’re listening to something you already know because your memory fills in the gaps. If you’re a Pandora lover you can create a stream of music that is based on an artist and then have Mog play music that it thinks is similar. There are all sorts of social network things you can do as well, but I won’t be doing them because I’ve got bigger(?) fish to fry.

Final word: I liked Spotify a little better but Mog is good for my purposes, is inexpensive, and I won’t be breaking the law. At an album a day I’d be able to listen to around 2500 songs over the course of the next six months for about a penny per song. In theory it’ll also save me 180 trips to and from my basement, and that can only be a good thing.