Week 5, Reading 1

Moof: A Free iTunes for the Web?
by Ben Parr

The social music revolution has brought us applications that provide us with better ways to access our favorite music cheaper. Of course, it’s not all free – iTunes songs have a cost and apps like Pandora have a fee after so many hours of use.
However a new app, Moof, with an acronym that explains the app for itself: music, online, on-demand, for free claims to have “all the functionality of a full desktop media player, in your browser.”

Moof:
Music, online: The player is simple and functional. Their claim that it has all of the functionality of a full desktop media player is not true but as a pure music player, Moof has everything you need to simply enjoy music.
On-demand, for free: Moof gets the music you request by connecting to YouTube and taking music videos from the world’s most popular online video website. The bottom-left of the player even has the corresponding video playing, which isn’t a bad touch. However, getting your music from YouTube has its issues – the biggest problem is noise. It’s shocking how much music is on YouTube actually, but that also causes a lot of noise.

What’s the assessment?
The Great: Your music library, portable anywhere you go. Even an iPod cannot hold the amount of music that Moof accesses via YouTube.
The Good: As a web music player, Moof is solid, if not revolutionary.
The Bad: The noise associated with pulling music from YouTube. Last.fm and PandoraPandora are more reliable and have far less noise because they stream actual songs from the artists, rather than music videos.

Probably its most direct competitor is GroovesharkGrooveshark, the online music search engine and jukebox. Grooveshark does almost all of the same things – find music, play music, create playlists, and even follow the music playlists of other friends. And while Moof is a strong product on its own, it still doesn’t beat its older and feature-rich competitor.
We believe Moof is a great product and look forward to future innovations, but we’re unconvinced that it provides functionality that makes it novel or unique from its many competitors. Hopefully they’ll find ways to surprise us.