With almost-daily innovations in portable interactive music, futuristic instruments and the online music community, it’s a great time to be a musician--or a fan.

Take Guitar Hero, for example. This addicting video game has inspired rock bands like Aerosmith to lend their faces and song catalogs to special editions. It’s led to students opting to become professional video-game players, and custom guitar hybrids that adapt for realistic gameplay. Never before have the interactive music and video game worlds collided so deliciously well.

And on the customized music front, there are websites like Musinaut that let you chop, screw and remix any song you upload to your heart’s content. This has inspired a whole new genre of interactive music, one that rock band Third Eye Blind is channeling for its new album by making their studio cuts available online and soliciting listener-made remixes.

Indeed, the Internet has changed the way interactive music is disseminated and enjoyed forever. Now albums are leaked online, sold at undetermined prices or for free, downloaded or sold on memory sticks rather than in traditional jewel-case CD format. Social networking sites are used for artists like Alicia Keys to find backup singers. And huge rock bands are selling tickets at bargain-basement prices to fill stadiums fairly.

Even the way we listen to interactive music has changed forever. MP3 players grow tinier by the minute, and they are now tailored to cyclists, runners, tie-wearing executives, religious individuals, dogs, and desk workers.

Read on to see how the face of music has changed in the new millenium, and how we’ll all interact with music now and in the years to come.