MusicRadar

The Midem conference brings together the music industry's finest minds and talking heads to announce, discuss, decide and argue the toss over the policies and technological advancements that will shape the coming year.

Here's everything you need to know about 2010's event, in six easy steps…

1. MusicDNA

MusicDNA, a new format that comes from the brains behind the all-conquering MP3, has easily been Midem 2010's biggest buzz word.

It's been developed by Dagfinn Bach, who worked on the world's first MP3 player in 1993, and has the backing of Karlheinz Brandenburg, director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology in Germany. He's been credited as the inventor of the MP3 itself.

MusicDNA is billed as an "enhanced, unified media format" that enables music to be tagged with lots and lots of metadata. Attributes such as tempo, instrumentation, mood and 'colour' can be added, which has consequences for the way people search for music, create playlists and discover similar material. Rather than being added manually, this data (or DNA) is generated through an automated analysis process of an existing audio file.

You can read more (if the site ever fixes itself) via MusicDNA.info. Let's hope the file format isn't as buggy.

2. Utopian streaming

The rise and rise of the likes of Spotify, We7 and streaming music is hardly a new revelation, but you'll be hard pushed to find any Midem 2010 coverage that doesn't mention at least one aspect of its effect (good and bad) on the future of the music industry.

The BBC describes The Cloud - listening to your music everywhere and anywhere all of the time via, you guessed it, the internet - as a utopian vision.

Spotify now has seven million users in six countries and its main UK rival, We7, has 2.5 million. And if the rumours surrounding a stream-able iTunes solution come to fruition, it's easy to see how streaming will become our main portal for music consumption, leaving downloadable music in its wake.

So, if technology allows, more users adopt 'premium' subscriptions (Spotify's £9.99 a month deal in the UK is pulling in 250,000 subscribers so far) and they can pay both labels and artists enough to keep them happy - some have compared their streaming 'cut' to that of an average busker's earnings - expect that utopian vision to be closer than expected.

Next: anti-piracy bills and fan engagement via Pete Wentz