I do not need a single destination for my music consumption needs.

Where do you go to find out about music? I don’t use MySpace. I don’t use Last.fm. I don’t use MOG. I do not use one specific site. How do I find out about music? Well, on top of talking to people in real life (irl for you Internet folk), I use THE INTERNET. Not one site, but the WHOLE INTERNET. Well as much of it as I end up finding from Google and other organic channels.

So when I read things like this relating to MOG.com’s relaunch: “The list of new features and site improvements are endless. The design and user interface have been completely revamped allowing MOG to reclaim the online music crown as its rightful owners.” MOG.com — I want to slap someone. No matter how much tongue in cheek there is here, I don’t doubt there are a lot of people who want to do the same thing as MOG are preaching right here.

Don’t get me wrong. I have accounts on a lot of sites. I gave up after a while, but am still around trying things out now and again. I use these sites to leverage features like recommendations, streaming, social relationships with artists and individuals, and all the other things you’d expect. Those are the site specific features I love. But what happens when I have to decide between two (it’s not two, it’s more like 100s of) sites that provide me similar aggregated content? What makes them special? Most of the time the answer is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

Once a site pushes to become the be all and end all of destinations for music related content consumption and makes that point obvious to me, I’m trusting their site less and less and less and less and less. Even if they’re an aggregator. I don’t go to NME.com, I get linked there because they generally post music news that’s the most important. How do I get there? From being linked on Gigulate.com. How did I get to there? I follow @gigulate on Twitter.com. It’s not one service. It’s a natural progression of channels and my interest. Granted the new MOG seems to do that too now! Good for them.

There’s a number of other inboxes I consume, namely email and rss, but when am I going to go to your single source of content (even if it is aggregated!)? What makes you think you’re bigger than the rest of the Internet for my music consumption needs? If I only ever used Last.fm for listening to music then I’d never find everything I might like, sure they have lots, but what about those artists who haven’t put their content on Last.fm? If I only ever used Spotify then I’d still have exactly the same problem. I guess I’ll backtrack and use the Internet instead. Granted I may end up at Last.fm, Spotify, or a similar site by using the Internet, but at least I’d find MORE.

The moral of this rant (if there is indeed one) is that it’d be great if services that want to help out in the promotion and aggregation of music related content would quit being so egotistical about how awesome their service is compared with another and cramming in as much as possible, when at the least they’re just pulling content from other places (even when that content is mp3s from the major labels!). Get back to work and make something awesome that I might want to use. If you think you’ve solved anything, you’re most probably wrong and are doing it just the same as someone else. Work with the Internet, don’t use it.

It ends up just coming down to profit. If you’re the be all and end all of music sites, I guess you take the lion’s share of the profit that that business receives. The problem for you now is that it’s fucking easy. It’s extremely fucking easy to have an idea relating to aggregating music online. But you’d better be fucking good at working with and understanding the Internet if you want to join in. If not, I guess you’re just a bunch of content and links taken from other sites and content owners (including your users). </rant>