Multimedia music content owners and distributors (publishers, archives, libraries, music shops, conservatories, etc.) are strongly interested in exploiting new methods of distribution and new interactive multimedia music functionalities. However, they are afraid of losing their content or money by selecting non standard, unsuitable and unsafe formats. This problem is mainly due to the lack of communication between themselves and research institutions. Technology providers often do not know the real needs n this area. MUSICNETWORK will implement concrete actions to bring music into the interactive media era stimulating both parties. To this aim, a set of activities will be implemented for understanding needs, assessing the research and technology, integrating the available technologies, and pushing them in the right direction in order to cope with the real needs. A WWW portal and specific periodic reports/surveys will be published and distributed, conferences and workshops will be organised. Integrated solutions and guidelines will be produced with some proposal standard and/or guidelines for the adoption of current active standards. MUSICNETWORK will have the relevance and strength for driving music industries into the interactive multimedia era.
Objectives:
The main objective is to create a community to bring the Music European industries and content providers in the interactive multimedia era. This becomes possible by putting together research institutions, industries and experts which have the required relevance to reach the unique objective of studying and defining multimedia music modelling and coding for the new age:
1) to create a collaborative environment so as to make easier the access to research results and technological solutions for music content providers and corporate users;
2) to provide training, technology transfer and access to expertise in the multimedia music field;
3) to use research institutes and standardisation bodies (such as Mpeg7, W3C, Mpeg21, etc.) in order to consider problems f music coding for multimedia integration and distribution aspects while preserving the owner rights;
4) to increase the competitiveness of content providers and distributors in the market of multimedia music delivering;
5) to increase awareness, confidence, consensus by content owners and providers towards the new solutions, technologies and music modelling, thus removing problems that limit the digitising of music archives;
6) to prepare the FP6 technology needs and development for the digital music;
7) to stimulate the exploitation of new functionalities that may open new markets for new ways of music distribution: e-publishing, e-book, virtual libraries, entertainment mobile, m-commerce, etc.