Discussions with MOG’s David Hyman, and some demos of the service,  leave me thinking that one thing Hyman and crew have to be recognized for is their willingness, or perverse stubbornness, to engage in extended negotiations with the labels (and publishers)  to obtain favorable license terms. These terms translated into the fully interactive streaming and playlist creation capabilities – functionality many consumers associate with more expensive Rhapsody and Napster services.

As we’ve noted in multiple notes and presentations, licensing content (by services from rightsholders) is a bigger challenge than any particular technology issue, and Hyman did nothing to dispute in that in our discussions. Hyman is no newbie when it comes to dealing with the labels given his time at Gracenote and SonicNet. That said, All Access is going to hit the market at roughly the same time Rhapsody and Napster (owned by BestBuy) will still be plugging away  but their subscriber numbers have either hit a plateau or dropped. But they continue to invest as apster just announced a deal with Dell to preload the Napster software on select Dell PCs and provide a year’s worth of free streaming and 60 free MP3 downloads, and Rhapsody has announced an iPhone application that lets existing subscribers extend their access to the iPhone. All Access will hear the footsteps of Europe’s favorite music service, Spotify, which is supposed to launch in the U.S. sometime in 2010.

What MOG’s going to be able to leverage is the nine-plus-million monthly visitors (counted in October, according to Quantcast) to MOG’s blogging network, started in 2006. Much of the MOG blogging network’s appeal is the nearly constant flow of reviews, thoughts and observations about music – the sort of information one would expect to see on a site devoted to music geeks who treat the interest with the kind of enthusiasm one typically sees with (some) sports fans.  If All Access can use the MOG network as a customer acquisition tool (without harming its inherent appeal to the bloggers and readers), one can imagine that incumbent music subscription services will be scrambling to survive.

What’s really likely to happen, though, is the favorable terms MOG was able to obtain will quickly be replicated by others. At that point, it will all be about the type of experience MOG can deliver that will differentiate it from the competition. But until I can get my hands on a demo account for All Access, we’ll have to wait and see.

If the Cisco-Warner Music Group deal to have Warner use Cisco’s Eos platform for developing and hosting its artists websites is any indication of the future of the music labels, it’s about using websites as a way to establish and maintain market relevance, relevance that labels maintained by the control they used to wield by when they controlled the creation and distribution of physical objects.

Now, it’s about establishing and maintaining the relationships with their artists by being able to help the band find and maintain an audience. Which, when you think about it, was, and maybe still is one of the central roles the music labels played in the distribution of pre-recorded music. (Only back then we called them “record labels.” Anybody reading this who is under 25, go ask your mom and dad.)

A by-product of the music industry’s transition, and the realignment of roles for the labels, has been the emergence of the so-called 360-degree deal in which the label not only gets a cut of CD and online, but now also seeks to get a cut of revenue streams – like ticket revenue from touring, merchandise sales – that were typically not part of most deals. Those streams used to be owned mostly by the bands/artists and their management teams.

So when you add these changes to the marketplace and the actual music labels, it becomes clear how important finding and nurturing talent might is an important role for labels to fill. Succeeding on that challenge means keeping a steady flow of new talent signing on – and in the music industry of 2009, succeeding in that means leveraging the tools of the Internet and social media to promote an artist. While digital sales at outlets like iTunes have been growing, the industry will have to find new ways to monetize both the content and the artists who create it.

To me, the Cisco-WMG deal is about a label putting the infrastructure together to deliver on the promises they have to make in order to get bands signed to the 360-degree deals, also referred to as “expanded rights” deals. WMG CEO Edgar Bronfman underscored this when he, in a recent earnings call, noted that more than half of WMG’s deals with band were of the “expanded rights” variety.

For WMG, Eos is a platform that gives them the flexibility to experiment with multiple engagement and monetization tactics. There are no established practices or music-label playbooks for this new frontier, so rapid experimentation with the ability to generate solid analytics to measure the experiments is required. This seems to be what WMG got from Cisco as they noted that Eos enables WMG to get an artist’s site up and running five times faster than the previous tools they were using.

Will other labels follow suit and sign on to Eos? Will bands and artists who grew up with the punk and post-punk DIY attitude? I think it’s going to be a tough sell, especially with artists who have already left (or were pushed out of) the big-label ecosystem.

More important to the long-term health of the music industry, however, is the sorts of strategies being embraced by labels such as WMG are the kinds of strategies that make them more appealing to artists who are just starting out?

But people (and here I’m speaking to the folks toiling away at the intersection of media and online technology) me and my ilk are happy to see the experimentation. But that does not mean you shouldn’t test the solution/offering a bunch before you launch even your “beta test.”

My latest brush with not-quite-ready offering: IMDB’s new “free” streaming video offering.

My beef? About the only videos that load reliably and play are those being redirected from Hulu.  The movie trailers? Full-length movies? Yes, those from Hulu play reliably. Independent short films? Nope.  Oh, all the pre-roll commercials played just fine. Flawless, actually.

Yes, I know it’s a beta, but still. Am I being too harsh? Are ad-supported beta sites for so-called “new media” offerings just the way it is going to be? (And, yes, I’m aware of the snafus created when established mainstream technology companies have suffered when launching allegedly “finished” products.)