One recent trend in the music software industry is the creation of development blogs, which, at their best, allow for interactivity with readers, describe new features of an upcoming product, and of course, build promotional interest before its launch.

Two recent development blogs have been for TC-Helicon's Harmony4 plug-in, which we reviewed in a lengthy post that was a recent Blogcritics' Editors' Pick of the Week, and Cakewalk's upcoming Project5 Version 2.5. We discussed an earlier version of Project5, here.

Cakewalk is also promoting their products via YouTube, such as this explanation of their Sonar recording program's ability to work with the 64-bit version of Windows, and its benefits:

As Hugh Hewitt discussed a couple of years ago in Blog, there's no reason why any industry couldn't adopt either of these promotional ideas to introduce new products to the marketplace--and there's no doubt, smarter companies will increasingly be doing just that.