MusicDNA - The Future of Music?

It has been revealed this week that the creators of the MP3 have made a new music file format. They have called this new format "MusicDNA". These files will work like MP3s but allow extra content such as videos, artwork, lyrics and blog posts to be included in the file. This content is continually updated keeping the file up to date.

Am I excited about this? In a word....no.

This is hardly an great evolution of what we currently have. When you download new music from iTunes you can get a digital booklet with it, do you really want anything else? I can imagine checking blogs or reviews etc before purchasing the music but after?

Over the past 20 odd years there have been big leaps in the way we play our music. In my mind the main reason for moving forward should always be because either the quality is greatly improved or because the new media makes is more easily portable. Being more easily portable isn't really an issue nowadays with the ability to carry 100s of thousands of MP3s on a single device.

The jump from vinyl to cassette was massive and the walkman was king. Moving on to CD the jump in quality was huge. Even minidisc had it's day due to it's size.

Whether MusicDNA becomes the next BluRay or Betamax remains to be seen. To me though it's like needlessly putting things together that exist on their own well enough in the first place. This is not an evolution.