Music streaming has always been a hard game if you haven’t had the massive market share of Spotify or Apple. MOG, backed in Australia by Telstra at its launch, is another loser in that game — after being bought out by Beats Music, itself just bought out by Apple, MOG has finally shut down — but not in Australia.
According to TechCrunch, MOG has finally shuttered its Web player in the US, after missing its scheduled end date of early April. If you’re checking out MOG from Australia, though, you’re still able to sign up — and Telstra’s branding is all over the site. The MOG name in Australia is just a brand on top of Telstra’s BigPond Music service, which continues to run unaffected.
Here’s the thing, though — MOG was acquired by Beats Electronics in 2012, and it was slated to close and transition as many of its customers as possible to Beats Music. Since Beats Music hasn’t launched in Australia yet — and isn’t likely to any time soon, just after being acquired by Apple — MOG in Australia is in a bit of a tricky situation.
You can still sign up for a free trial through the AU.MOG.com site, and after your 14-day trial is over you’ll be up for $11.99 per month for access to MOG’s 20 million-plus music tracks. The service is largely comparable to Spotify, Rdio and JB Hi-Fi NOW! — but now there’s a bit of a cloud hanging over it as to how long it’ll be running.
What does the end of MOG in the US and around the world mean for Telstra and BigPond Music? As far as we can tell, nothing — it appears to be business as usual. We’ve reached out to Telstra to see whether the planned move over to Beats Music is still on the cards after its Apple buy-out.
Update: Telstra’s response about MOG and Beats is as follows —
We’re looking forward to understanding the detail in due course and will work with Beats on this.
Of course we will let our customers know more information when we know more.
MOG will continue to run as normal at this stage.