I don’t know if you noticed, but there is an increasing interrest for interactive music recently. At the same time, it is starting to talk about the future of mp3… One have to admit that the format is getting a little bit old. The first patent has been filed… 24 years ago ! there are 11 core patents and a lot of additional one, but these 11 key ones will progressively expire ( a patent last 20 years) and become public domain.

The record have then thought that it is now time to try to be innovative (for once), probably because the remembered that they ignored the mp3 when it appeared back on the late nighties,. They then designed CMX… a format that remain largely a enigma, but as far as I understand which deals mostly with add-on such as multimedia content and images (either fixed or animated). Let us wait and see, but we hope that it won’t be a deceptive attempt as was Pressplay and MusicNet in the early 2000′.

The other project that has been rumoured a lot is Cocktail, which the inventor is no other than… Apple itself. There too, there is very little information, apart the fact that is will be a proprietary format, mostly focused on video bonuses…

All this may be a indication that mp3 is getting old, but the most interesting might be elsewere… the industry is starting to realise that people want more than music and that existing format can’t deliver that request. Video has been able to organise its shift (from DVD to bluray and even from DVD to Flash), so there is no reason to believe that music can’t.