Digital firms playing a new tune in music sales

By Steve Mollman For CNN

(CNN) -- You might have got 40,000 songs on your MP3 player, but in one sense they're all rather boring: They sound the same every clip you play them.

A Gallic start-up claims it have a new formatting that lets for a song to be recorded and played back in different ways.

For all the alterations in the music industry, today's people usually come in a studio with a mind-set small changed from 50 old age ago: They trust to bring forth a unchanging song. A recording might stop up inch billions of MP3 players, but it always sounds the same.

Now a start-up in City Of Light called Musinaut claims to have got a fresh manner of doing things with a formatting called MXP4. The formatting lets for a song to be recorded and played back in many different ways, and for supernumeraries such as as notes, pictures and words to be included in the file, as well. Think of it as MP3 on steroids.

With traditional attacks to merchandising music faltering -- and digital gross gross sales not filling in the spread -- record companies are unfastened to new thoughts such as as Musinaut's.

According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, digital sales last twelvemonth increased 40 percentage to $2.9 billion. But that's A mere 15 percentage of the music market, and it doesn't do up for declining cadmium sales. Meanwhile, illegal downloads outnumber sold paths by a 20-to-1 margin.

"The cadmium marketplace is in crisis," states Claudio Checchia, an analyst with research house IDC. "Now there's a batch of rethinking of the old concern models. The record labels are actually much more than willing now to research different opportunities."

"People experience there's a sea change, that the industry is a batch more unfastened than it have been previously," adds Musinaut chief executive officer Patricia Thomson. Don't Girl
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Lawsuit in point: Universal Joint Music signed a trade with Nokia whereby the label will acquire a cut of French telephone grosses in exchange for giving users of certain French telephones free entree to every song in its catalogue (for 12 calendar months only, but they can maintain them). And labels are teaming up with popular music-oriented societal networking land land sites such as as LastFM and Imeem: For allowing entree to their songs, the labels acquire a cut of the sites' advertisement revenues.

Some record labels have got also been talking to Musinaut, which was founded in June 2006. With the start-up's recording software, any work can go synergistic and infused with new spirits or genres. Parameters such as as "this round always travels with this baseline" can be added, but an algorithmic rule guarantees the song plays out differently each time.

Such capablenesses might appeal to a label that have the rights a asleep artist's works, for instance. With MXP4, new assortment could spice up well-worn tunes. Today's people could add spirits to the maestro tracks, creating something that's partly a testimonial record album and partly a new creative activity with near-infinite variety.

Newer music, of course, can also be recorded in the format. The Paris-based act Dinner at the Thompson's (www.myspace.com/dinneratthet) remixed its recent path "Consciousness" into MXP4, adding afro-beat and electrofunk spirits to the original trip-hop psyche composition.

"It changes how you compose," states member Sabrice Viel, who took a one-half twenty-four hours to larn the recording software system and is enthusiastic about the possibilities.

Other DJs, manufacturers and picture game composers have got also expressed excitement, states Musinaut's Thomson. For videogame composers, MXP4 computer addresses an old problem: When participants acquire stuck in one subdivision of the game, the same music often cringles maddeningly until they travel on. With MXP4, the music could be more than varied, while still sticking to a general theme.

MXP4 also gives hearers more say. A downloadable MXP4 participant will soon be offered on the Musinaut land site (www.musinaut.com). A hearer in a funky temper can choose the afro-beat version of "Consciousness," for instance, instead of the original.

Such characteristics would look at place in a human race where synergistic amusement is on the rise. "People have got moved beyond simply being inactive hearers of music, or inactive spectators of telecasting shows," states analyst Microphone McGuire of research house Gartner. Instead, he says, they desire to interact with, remark on, tag, share, and pull strings their media.

So far relatively small MXP4 music is available. But the company have three studios around City Of Light where assorted people like Dinner at the Thompson's are busy recording in the format. The company also runs a little label, Flight Truffles. (The label's site, www.flyingtruffles.com, volition have signed artists, and their MXP4 music, when it travels live.)

Musinaut trusts that once the participant and more than MXP4 music is available, the formatting will spread. It visualizes mainstream MP3 devices, cell telephones and software system mass media participants becoming MXP4 enhanced.

Of course, whether adequate labels, people and hearers follow MXP4 -- and whether it works well -- stays to be seen. Musinaut is basically an experiment. But with the music industry unusually unfastened to new ideas, the company's timing, at least, looks well played.