Excellent article by Andrea Leonelli from Digital Music Trends

In the past four years there has been a growing focus on music interaction as a way to offer a third dimension to the consumption of music. Through my podcast I have come across many companies who have all approached the concept of music interactivity from different angles by creating new formats, games, enhanced auditory experiences and personalized remixes.

Though the vast majority of the companies listed below have fundamentally different approaches the goal is the same: enriching the music consumption process and turning a passive experience into an active and engaging one.

This attempt is not dissimilar to the way in which the movie studios have decided to push out 3D as a mean to get the public to attach a new value the cinema experience - they needed to find something the public could not get by sitting in front of their 40″ TVs. Unfortunately whilst 3D is an easy form of passive interactivity and has grown to become a somewhat unified experience that is easily understood by the public, creating an interactive experience with music is a lot trickier. Music is not something that can be simply “3-Defied”.

In-browser applications, standalone software, mobile apps, proprietary formats are only some of the ways in which the following companies have chosen to carry their products but they are by no means mutually exclusive. Categorization by means of implementation is therefore nearly impossible.

In the following paragraphs is an attempt to bring together some of the companies working in this space in a way that makes most sense to me. It does not want to be a definitive list but an overview of a field that is extremely dynamic. I would not be surprised to find that some of the companies listed below will have transformed their product and business model entirely in six months or a year’s time.

Full article here