Looking to tap into the social networking phenomenon unleashed by the likes of MySpace, a new Web site for so-called "music freaks" launched today.

The new site, dubbed MOG, aims to be a music recommendation service like that of Pandora, but instead of the service recommending music, users will derive those recommendations from their online "friends" who share similar music tastes.

"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," MOG founder David Hyman said. "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."

MOG leans heavily on the social networking tools of MySpace, and it also employs a dose of what made the original Napster so appealing: the ability to see what music other users have on their hard drives.

But in the modern era of record industry lawsuits against file-sharers and P2P services, there's an obvious catch. Users can control what music on their hard drives surface on their MOG page, and although users can listen to 30-second snippets on their friends' pages, there is no downloading function. There are, however, links to buy music from Amazon and iTunes.

"We allow you to edit anything in your collection from adding CDs you've been listening to in your car or vinyl you've been spinning at a recent party to deleting those embarrassing Olivia Newton-John tracks," Hyman added.

MOG requires users to download its MOG-O-MATIC application that catalogs the music on users' computer hard drives while monitoring what they play most and what they download. That data is analyzed several ways and posted to users' MOG Web pages. MOG also offers blogging tools and the ability to add MOG to other blogs and MySpace pages.

The site has a solid pedigree. Hyman is one of digital music's founding fathers, cofounding the pioneering online music site Addicted to Noise in the mid-1990s and then serving as CEO of CD recognition and music database company Gracenote before joining MTV last year.

User-driven music recommendations are expected to help drive the future of online music, according to a December 2005 report from Gartner Research analyst Michael McGuire.

"By 2010, 25 percent of online music store transactions will be driven directly from consumer-to-consumer taste sharing applications, such as playlist publishing and ranking tools built into online music stores or external sites with links to stores," the report stated.