We spent an hour futzing around with MOG.com, the new streaming service “that promises an experience better than Rhapsody, Pandora and iTunes combined” for $5 a month, and here are our quick thoughts:

Pros
– Excellent sound quality. My entirely non-scientific evaluation from some decent computer speakers leads me to believe it sounds much fuller and less compressed than Rhapsody or Pandora’s streams.
– Slick interface. It blows away Rhapsody’s clunky UI.
– There’s quite a bit of content for each artist, as MOG uses it’s advertising network to pull down artist-specific news posts.
– There’s a lot of extra information like lyrics and bios.
– There’s a great slider function that lets you find a preferred balance between listening to an all-artist station and a station of just similar artists. You can adjust the slider at any point in the playlist. We really like this feature.
– The library seems pretty good, with all four major labels signed on, and we see most of the notable metal labels (Roadrunner, Nuclear Blast, Century Media, Ferret, Relapse, etc.)

Cons
– The library isn’t that complete: Tool and Metallica are among notable artists not yet signed on, but this could/should change as the service develops.
– You can’t edit playlists on-the-fly. So let’s say you really like what’s coming up on a “similar artists” queue, but there’s a couple skippables, you can’t remove them ahead of time or wedge in something else without wiping the entire queue clean.
– The recommendation engine seems to be a bit more refined than the other services.
– Some of the bios seem to be out of date and the news/blog posts are either user generated or from other sites, so it’s a bit slipshod.

Have you had time to use it? What do you think? Is a $5 monthly streaming buffet worth it?