...I think it would be hard to make a piece of music really "meaningful" if it is just a 1-minute-looping sorta thing. For instance, I ended up turning the music in EQ off when the battle music started to annoy me. Yeah, I like the Othmir music though even though it was short and loopy - it was kinda unconventional for the game and for the area. Maybe if they add some heavy metal here and there I'll care a bit more, or if the music is less of an "ambient" feature, which would be hard to do because it's going to be mapped to a certain area most of the time.
Maybe the answer is to make music more situational. For instance, instead of playing battle music every time you fight, playing certain music for certain enemies and whatnot. Or instead of mapping music to the bards guild and area surrounding, play music when you want to initiate a quest, and maybe zoom the camera in for dialogue and stuff.
I just find it to be a big problem with creating meaningful music in an online RPG like this. But then again, if they have a good composer, they might be able to make the music diverse and stuff. It seems like this Jason Hayes stuff (
http://www.blizzard.com/wow/movies/#music), though pretty cool, is all the same sounding. It's all "foresty" and "ambient" music, nothing really different, or "othmir-like" even. Ehehehehe...
Also consider the people like me who will be constantly playing Liquid Tension Experiment and Dream Theater in winamp in the background - it's not as if we have as much interest in the game music as we do in other stuff. It would be very hard to keep people like us attached to the game music.