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Mog Me Baby

I have a new best friend. His name is Roscoe Bear.

He looks like a bear, at least from the picture - bearded, slope-shouldered, sleepy-eyed under amber shades and some sort of blue bandanna. He lives in Overland Park, Kansas, and is into the Raconteurs, Spoon, Lake Trout, Kings of Leon, My Morning Jacket. We haven't met.

I'm not even sure Roscoe knows he's my new best friend. The computer matched us late last night, after it went through all 6,717 songs in my digital music collection. I'm experimenting with MOG, which is a new social network for music heads.

MTV.com described the audience for MOG this way:

If you categorize your albums by geographic location, original release date or instrumental make-up, you're a music geek. If the Beck playlist on your iPod is named after a lyric fragment like "Drive-by Body-pierce," you're a total music geek.

The idea is that artificial intelligence programs like Pandora won't do nearly as good a job finding new music for you as will a living, breathing human Roscoe Bear.

MOG's founder, David Hyman, told Mp3.com recently:

"Like an older brother that plays you Miles Davis for the first time or a favorite musician that turns you on to an unexpected influence, MOG helps people connect with trusted voices to expand their musical exposure. Computer-generated recommendation models tend to be self-referential in nature and don't account for the fact that taste is complex and ever-evolving."

The program asks you to register and download its MOG-O-Matic, which requires a leap of faith; you are allowing it do look through your hard drive and report to the MOG community what you've been listening to. This can be frightening. But you have the ability to edit out any songs that you don't want seen, in case you've, say, just downloaded an 18-disc collection of live Bruce Springsteen from somewhere that's a little wrong.

It lets you share what your first concert was ...... Tom Rush opening for B.B. King in Worcester, Mass, around 1970. And your first album ....... Meet The Beatles. I ruined my older sister's copy, and so had to go to Soundtrack Records, where I paid all of $3.19 to replace it. It allows you write whatever you want about music in its blog space.

The results have been intriguing.

I downloaded the program last night, and it took so long to sift through my stuff that I went to bed with it still working. This morning, news about "similar MOGS" awaited me on my personal page. Roscoe had the closest taste, according to MOG, which linked me to his page.

There, he lists what he's been playing most this week, what shows he's looking forward to. He's written a little story about a mix-up that kept him from seeing Tom Waits the other night.

My new MOG pal had traveled all the way to Atlanta to see Tom Waits, and downed a couple beers before a misunderstanding at the box office shut out four of his six pals. So he gallantly went back to the hotel, rolled a fat one then watched Stop Making Sense on the flat screen. My new best friend sounds like trouble.

But it's a virtual thing, so let's see what sort of music he's going to turn me onto.

His top artist this month is The Doves, Brits I like. His top song this week is "Put You Behind" by Keane. Keane I don't so much like.

The beauty part is that MOG let's me play a 30-second snippet of the what everyone's listening to. I check out his last song, Depeche Mode's "Dreaming of Me."

Not my style.

But the nice thing about MOG is that Roscoe Bear is not like some roommate they've assigned me to for the whole year, the kind who commandeers the stereo and pounds 40 oz with his hilarious friends while I'm trying to sleep. He's just topping a list of other MOG buddies, each of whom has their own picks.

Pinkfish of Los Angeles has been listening to Teddy Thompson and Calexico - me, too. SatisfiedMinds614 of Columbus, Ohio, has been into Ray LaMontagne and Bob Dylan's "Forever Young." Good again.

Another Philly guy, jvanshoick  is into Johnny Cash and Explosions in the Sky, so I'll go check out the latter, whom I've read about but never heard.

A cool aspect is that I've found a few familiar artists' names among the MOGS. I picked the singer-songwriter Jolie Holland's page, which led  me to all sorts of Americana songs I've never heard, and then a chain of her trusted MOG friends, each of whom had some pretty good music on their own lists.

I'll report back if I don't get lost in Tony Scalzo's playlist.

PLD
Posted 08/08/2006 02:02:55 PM
I only just heard about MOG yesterday. How long has it been around?
daily album
Posted 08/08/2006 02:05:26 PM
Explosions In The Sky are fantastic. 

riyl [recommended if you like]: mogwai, godspeed you! black emperor, sigur ros

http://www.myspace.com/texasband
daniel rubin
Posted 08/08/2006 02:49:37 PM
think it launched in june
Matt
Posted 08/08/2006 11:41:46 PM
I second Explosions in the Sky.  You've heard them if you've seen *Friday Night Lights*.

My favorite of theirs, I think, is "Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place."