Onemug - The listening experience with Pandora compared to Mog is quite different and which you prefer will probably depend on what you want from a streaming service.
With MOG you're almost completely in control of what you listen to and in what order. Pandora makes most of the choices for you, guided by your starting point and how much time you spend 'training' it.
The MOG desktop application is well designed and intuitive, at least for me, and there are a number of ways you can select and organize music. You can build playlists, like the ones in iTunes, by album, artist or song. You can also view others' playlists if they've made them public.
In addition to playlists you can tag albums or tracks as 'favorites' and have them always accessible.
Doing a search for an artist will pull up all their work in the catalog, organized by album or track. You also get a list of similar artists. There's also a 'browse' function for new releases, editors' picks and top albums and tracks.
Once you begin choosing and playing music a page is created for you that lists other music that the algorithm thinks you'd like. If you play an album and the album ends without your choosing another album MOG will start playing something it thinks is similar, in the same way that Pandora does.
With both Pandora and MOG's algorithms the more mainstream your taste the more likely you'll be to get other, similar music. For instance, I listen to a lot of fairly obscure stuff and creating a Pandora station for one of them pulls up only limited choices that are often not that similar and there's a lot of repetition. That's less of a problem with MOG's choices because you have much more control over what it plays.
If you pay $10 a month to MOG rather than the standard $5 you can get a mobile app that lets you download any music you want to your tablet or smartphone so that it's available anytime offline. You can keep it as long as you maintain a subscription, if you drop your subscription the downloaded music magically disappears.
As with all software there are details of the navigation in MOG you have to get used to that can seem confusing at first, but that's true of Pandora, as well. MOG works like a combination of iTunes, where everything is under your control, and Pandora, where the choices are made for you and the serendipity is valuable.
I still listen to Pandora and Spotify sometimes but it's MOG most of the time. As I said, though, which you prefer will probably depend on your musical taste and your personal preference for how your music is served up.
