NYConvergence ORIGINAL
by: Amy Berryhill

At the February Digital Music NY Meetup there was the sense that music making is not doomed to forever shrinking profits. Speakers focused on the music industry's 2010 Midem Conference, held each year in Cannes, to highlight some promising activity in both technology and rights management.

Eric de Fontenay, Founder and President of MusicDish, revealed his top picks for new products and services unveiled at the conference. The first was MusicDNA, an encoding method that will embed multimedia within the MP3 file format. In addition, de Fontenay was excited about a new organization called IMPEL that will allow independent publishers to secure digital music rights across Europe from one centralized rights manager.

He was also optimistic that many attendees of the 2010 Midem Conference were first time attendees. "Having a third of the people being new, which means they're independent, really means to me that there is a passing of the guard," said de Fontenay.

While speaker Gilles Babinet, Chairman and Co-Founder of Eyeka, was quick to point out that big record labels are still producing most of the chart topping music, he agreed with de Fontenay that this year is a good year for the music industry. "We  kind of hit the bottom at the last Midem," said Babinet, "this one was much better."