New technology was presented recently at the 110th Audio Engineering Society convention in Amsterdam that may have a huge affect the future of digital watermarks. At least three systems are being developed for the indexing of and index-based searches of PCM-based digital audio material. Given a short excerpt of a waveform signal as a query, the systems returns all pieces of music in a database containing that waveform.

This makes the identification of audio programming a non invasive operation. The audio material would  not need to contain a digital watermark in order to be identified because it can be electronically identified  in this new way.

Digital watermarks are inserted into digital music so it can be identified at a later date. Digital watermarks like digital compression produce artifacts in the music material. Any artifacts are undesirable and  will have some negative affect on music quality, so any technology that can eliminate their use is a great thing.