Interview with MOG’s Anu Kirk
by Ben Scudder
Services like Rhapsody charge a monthly subscription fee to grant users, with browsers or mobile apps, access to an extensive music catalogue. The content is stored on a server somewhere other than the user’s hard drive (i.e. “the cloud”). There is no need to safe-keep a personal music collection or move it around devices. MOG is an example of a pioneering cloud-based service, and we wanted to know more. Anu Kirk, is the Lead Product Manager of Mobile Content.
MBJ: What is MOG doing to acquire licenses/content? Where do you feel MOG has the most potential for growth in terms of its catalogue?
Anu Kirk: MOG uses a company called MediaNet as the provider for our catalogue. We also have our own in-house licensing team of people with some legal background, some label background, and we proactively reach out to specific labels that we want to make sure that we have on board. This process is based on feedback from our users, who request such content, but also on our knowledge of the industry and our desire to bring in, so to speak, cool labels. We reach out and ask these labels if they’d like to be part of MOG. We have contracts, or terms that we offer them, we send out an agreement, and hope that they sign.
MBJ: Do you find that MOG has been reaching out to smaller indie labels lately, or is MOG still focused on trying to make deals with larger independent or major record labels?
AK: Well, I feel that ‘indie label’ is sort of a vague term. Fifteen years ago, an indie label would have been something like Amphetamine Reptile, or something like SST [Records]. But today, an indie label can literally be a guy that’s made a couple of records on his computer. I definitely think there’s a difference between that and a company that has been around for a couple of years with a sizable catalogue and sales of physical product. And sometimes, if it’s a label that people have heard of in spite of the tiny genre it serves, we go after it. But many smaller labels that are genre specific, or even just digital, come to us directly because they’ve heard about the service and they want to make sure their music is placed. Many are happy to go through an aggregator like IODA, CD Baby, Tunecore, or a service like that. One of the interesting things about being a record label today is that it is not all that different from what running a label was like back in the days of physical media. Think about what you’re trying to do at a label: you’re trying to sell your product. In the old days, you would be on the phone with distributors trying to make sure that your record was at Tower Records, the Virgin Megastore, Sam Goody, and the warehouse. Now you make sure that you’re on MOG, iTunes, Rhapsody, and Rdio. The label has some interest in getting their stuff to us as well. Continue Reading full interview…
