This was published in the Music Ally Report : OPINION the REPORT | 21 January 2010 | Page 12

“The CD is frozen”: the next wave of interactive music

At the end of 2009, MXP4 interviewed up-and-coming artrockers Pony Pony Run Run as part of the lead up to their first MXP4 release [http://mxp4.com/play-with-it/ponyponyrunrun/]. Their lead singer made an interesting point when talking about why the band has been engaging more and more with new technology and social media: “the CD is frozen”.

It’s a great way of summing up the difference between traditional music formats, and more immersive, interactive formats that will be making an impact on music fans this year. The music listening experience, whether on vinyl, CD or MP3, hasn’t changed since the beginning of recorded music – you press play, you listen, you move on.

Music will always be enjoyed this way – but new technologies are now throwing up really exciting options for extending that experience.

What we at MXP4 – and other music tech companies like RjDj, as well as artists like Major Lazer and David Guetta – are creating is a way of enhancing music, just as something like Avatar has enhanced the movie experience. With MXP4, the listener becomes an active participant, and the music itself becomes more like software: something that can be updated, expanded and added to.

At its simplest, MXP4 is a complete bundle of an artist’s multimedia content – music, videos, biog, tour dates, social network share buttons etc. – in one file, similar to Apple’s iTunes LP or the CMX project led by the majors.

Where we go further is in offering game-like interactive music applications alongside this content, enabling music fans to play with the music, rather than just listen to it. One interactive feature allows you to play with and recombine the different parts of a song, isolating just the vocal for example.

This is particularly exciting with an artist like Michael Jackson [http://mxp4.com/play-with-it/michaeljackson]. To be able to strip such timeless music down to its essential parts, to hear studio noises from the session in the background, to experience this familiar music in a whole new way, and then be able to recombine each part to create a personalised remix – this should be an incredibly compelling prospect for any music fan.

Additionally, our Max It functionality takes hundreds of different parts (or ’stems’) of a track – vocals, guitar riffs, drum loops, and so on – and mashes them together in endless variations in real-time, to create dynamic new arrangements as you listen.

Listening to a Max It song is like listening to music constantly reinventing itself and evolving in real-time, taking a song way beyond the traditional three-minute pop format.

Artists including Pink, Britney Spears and Basement Jaxx have already released MXP4 versions of their recent hits. MXP4 is something that every artist can work with, and we see the future in terms of artists creating both MP3s and MXP4s as a matter of course, giving their fans more to play with as a way of keeping them engaged with each new release.

And we are seeing incredible uptake. At the end of 2009 we released stats that revealed music fans play with the interactive applications for an average of 9.1 minutes across 2.6 tracks. Perhaps more significantly, the interactive format – which keeps users on the page for minutes rather than the seconds they might spend flicking across YouTube or MySpace – means fans are more willing to engage with merchandise and other content than when they are in a listen-only mode. Data from a recent campaign tracked by MXP4 shows that up to 3% of click-through traffic results in sales.

There’s a new generation out there who aren’t buying CDs, but who turned Modern Warfare 2 into the biggest entertainment launch in history. Attempting to engage with this generation demands a new way of thinking about what music and music formats can be – but opportunities are huge, for both the music fan and the industry.