Music industry plans new digital format

Added extras to boost album sales...

Four of the world's biggest music companies are trying once again to steal Apple's thunder by introducing a new format for downloadable digital music.

Sony, Warner, Universal and EMI are all collaborating on CMX, a media bundling system that will deliver not only music tracks, but sleeve notes, photographs, videos and lyrics. Those of you old enough to remember vinyl LPs from the olden days will no doubt be getting all nostalgic for gatefold covers and information on the music you are listening to that doesn't require a magnifying glass to be of any use.

But it seems that the lumbering giant that is the music industry has failed to learn anything from the past ten years of MP3 mayhem. Most importantly, that generation XYZ has a pathetically short attention span.

People just don't want to buy entire albums these days. We now live in a world where consumers are no longer forced to buy 11 sub-standard filler tracks just to get their hands on the one song they actually like... you know... the one off the car ad on the telly that goes, deee doo doo da dee dum dum.

Apple at one time tried forcing people to cough up the cash for unwanted goods with album-only Itunes purchases, but the Cupertino company soon caught the whiff of an ill wind coming from its customers and scrapped the idea. And the move away from album sales into single track browsing has totally changed the way music is created and marketed.

In fact, the whole way in which people listen to music has changed on a cultural level. Thirty years ago, your average groovy young hipster would have come home from Woolworth's with the new Emerson Lake and Palmer opus clutched in his sweaty mitts, donned his enormous headphones, and sat cross legged on his patchwork beanbag absorbing every word of the copious - and in most cases totally undecipherable - sleeve notes.

Today's bright young things barely have the attention span to read the heating instruction on their doner kebab-flavoured pot noodles while they listen slack-jawed to the latest sub-karaoke TV talent show discovery, let alone absorb the intricacies of a 20 minute guitar solo, or wonder who played the triangle on track seven.

The real issue here is, however, tied up in the fact that the mighty Apple was given the opportunity to become one of the companies involved in the development of CMX, but politley declined. Then it promptly sloped off to quietly develop its own 'music plus' format, currently codenamed Cocktail.

The sad truth of the matter is that Apple is such a huge player in the music download market that any format not compatible with either iTunes or the annoyingly ubiquitous iPod is doomed - if not to fail - then at least to struggle along in perpetual second place.