SongTrellis
Music and Musical Know-how For You

Author:  David Luebbert Posted:  12/26/07; 10:09:21 PM Msg#:  5388 (top msg in thread) Prev/Next:  5387/5389 Reads:  59367

Having fun on Mog.com

I've been working with the MOG website, mog.com, recently. That's a social networking site devoted to music. They speak of mogging all over the site, which I think is a contraction of the phrase "music blogging".

The site considers all of the music posted on Rhapsody, several million pieces, and all of the videos available on YouTube and other video sites as topics for musical discussion. When you create a new discussion topic there, it asks you which musician, album and track you wish to discuss, and when your message is posted, a play button appears which launches a Rhapsody player to play that track. Inside of your message posts you can also insert the video-playing HTML code supplied that is supplied for videos on YouTube, DailyMotion or other depositories of music videos. Once you've made a video posting, the play controller for that video appears in your posted message.

Your postings about particular music are linked to pages on the site that are maintained for every artist mentioned by users, every one of their albums that are discussed, and every track mentioned. Your post is also presented to members who are looking for tracks to listen to and videos to watch.

You can do searches by type of musical genre and can search for tags that authors can attach to their posts.

Every MOG member on signup is given a profile page which is searchable and visible to all of the other members. If you wish, you can install a widget there which displays play buttons for the music that you've recently listened to, one which lists music that you'd especially like others to know about, and another which lists the music in your personal collection on your computer.

When it displays your personal music collection list, MOG discovers the tunes that you own which are also listed on Rhapsody. If Rhapsody, can play the tune, a Play icon appears immediately to the left of the tune name in that list.

You can find my profile at:
http://mog.com/DLuebbert

If you've found another member whose music choices and recommendations are useful for you, you can subscribe to their profile page, which causes MOG to list a button to their profile on your profile.

These personal profile pages with Play buttons attached end up being a way to share music with others without running afoul of copyright restrictions. Real Networks, which owns Rhapsody, makes payments to the copyright owners to compensate for the tracks that are played. To encourage usage of the Rhapsody, any person can play up to 50 tracks per month using the Rhapsody player software that launches in a web browser window when they press a Play button. If you'd like to listen to more tracks than the promotional limit allows, you may decide to become a Rhapsody subscriber, which allows you access to the service's entire library for $9.95 per month in the U.S.

If you don't wish to subscribe to Rhapsody , you can wait out the month and use your 50 track

allotment next month. If you have access to multiple computers, you can transfer your Mog and Rhapsody browsing to a new machine and use up the 50 track allowance for that machine. Rhapsody allows anonymous access, so seems they enforce the 50 track Play limit by keeping track of the unique Mac address which is assigned to any computer's Internt access card.

Even if you are not a Rhapsody subscriber and have used up your Rhapsody allotment, you might find the video listings on the site to be interesting, since these are open to all.

I've collected a few hundred music links in the Video Links section of SongTrellis. Since most of the things I've found haven't been noticed yet by other MOG members, I did 8 postings there on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. I wrote intros and commentaries for some of the more important videos I've found. You can see these by scrolling down through the middle column of my profile page on MOG.

Also great fun in the Amazon Jazz Discussions

Amazon has a set of discussion groups buried in the understructure of their site. Someone asked for comments on Wayne Shorter's music in their Jazz group.

I have a very high opinion of Wayne as a composer and improvisor, so I took the bait, and contributed this response.

Later, Joel, who started this thread, asked if I would write something about the harmonies that Wayne used in his work, so I wrote this about Shorter's harmonies.

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