We are right in the thick of Midem, perhaps the largest music industry summit/conference/trade fair/schomooze fest in the world. Attendance for the event is down 13% from last year, with some companies choosing to send only a few or no delegates at all (Universal Music Group was noted as having no presence whatsoever). No doubt a sign of the times;  international travel and accommodations for a networking opportunity, albeit a very rich one, may be hard to justify at the moment.

But from the looks of it, the climate at Midem does not to be one characterized by downturn- the sheer volume of game-changing launches, partnerships, and ideas coming out of Cannes this week is overwhelming. (BTW, I’m keeping up with everything Midem on their homepage here, through Music Ally, and my industry news stalwart hypebot).

The streaming music subscription service Spotify continues to attract  attention as it closes in on a U.S. launch- understandably so, as its’ captured significant market share in Europe (as of July 2009, they had 2 million registered users in Great Britain and an additional 2 million in Europe)- In Sweden, Spotify appears to be paying out more in licensing fees to Universal Music Group than UMG’s Itunes sales royalties. Check out Bruce Houghton’s write-up of the viability of a U.S. Spotify launch, and some very interesting figures (ratio of paying/non-paying subscribers necessary for sustainability) regarding the company’s targets here. While we aren’t exactly on the precipice of U.S. Spotify launch, its’ viability in Europe is making the case for the paid subscription music pricing model vs. the Itunes pay-per-track system.

Another curious new technology that is abuzz in Cannes is MusicDNA, which is being hailed as the successor to the Mp3 as a digital file format for music- the MusicDNA file format offers a host of other content to music fans, such as videos, tour dates, lyrics, social media engagement, and more- and allegedly, the file format allows for all these features to be updated automatically in real time. For more info on MusicDNA, check this out.

These are two of the more buzzworthy topics at Midem, but are among many influential ideas/announcements/unveilings that have (and are sure to continue to) come out of the conference this week.  So why my thinly-veiled juxtaposition of these two companies?

Because as future-oriented music technology services, they appear to be occupying VERY different head spaces. Spotify is the media darling of paid-subscription streaming music services, but has several conceptual brethren- LaLa, Pandora, Grooveshark, Deezer- all subscription services that placed users libraries in the cloud, offered free streaming, and hoped to convert non-paying casual users to paying subscribed users.

The point is that Spotify is at the vanguard of a perceived industry movement towards streaming music from the cloud, rather than maintaining a library of digital music on one’s hard drive. And this makes an enormous amount of sense- once all consumer electronic devices have internet connections, what’s the functional difference between having the MP3 (or the MP3-DNA, for that matter) and having streaming access anytime, anywhere?

So are the minds behind MP3-DNA woefully ignorant of the movement towards the cloud? Probably not. But it appears that in order to make their new digital music file format effective, they need to be interacting with file-based libraries, not cloud-based. They have the ability to convert current users’ music libraries from mp3 to their rich media format (Mp3-DNA), but they better move quick- soon, it appears, everyone will be in the cloud.