Online Music Collaboration During Lockdown
As the social distancing takes its toll on society, musicians all over the world find themselves stranded inside, with no shows, gigs, street performances or even band practices allowed. With everyone turning online though, new possibilities are opening up for musicians.
When it comes to what musicians can do while self-isolating, there’s one activity that can help on all levels, from general practice, though fun content for social media, to professional connections, and ultimately, money. If conducted and presented properly, online music collaboration has the potential to elevate your career to new levels.
Whether you’re collaborating with your friends, musicians you’ve met online, or an entire music group, there are multiple ways of connecting, practicing, jamming, or remixing that can be a lot of fun, and ideally, you shoot an awesome video that goes viral.
Even if you’re a solo performer or a starter, you can reach out to musicians you don’t know and might not even be on the same continent. Reddit is a powerful tool for this, check out r/musicians, r/WeAreTheMusicMakers, or r/ThisIsOurMusic. You’ll find hundreds if not thousands of musicians like yourself and whether it’s a collaboration or anything else music-related, you should join the conversation.
Collaboration Tools
Depending on your equipment, the type of collaboration you want or the quality standards you set for yourself, there are different options with different capabilities. Here are some which can help you in starting and releasing a collaboration project.
Ninjam
When it comes to jamming online, the biggest issue is syncing different feeds with music coming from different places and everybody’s stream lagging more or less. Ninjam provides a very interesting and intuitive response for live online collaboration, it delays the stream each musician is getting by one musical note. So everyone is jamming to what others previously recorded and the track is updated live, at the start of each new note.
JQBX.fm
A while back, in 2011 There was this thing called Turntable.fm which allowed individuals or groups across the world to listen to the same music at the same time, sharing an amazing experience. The platform was very popular for a few years but got shut down due to a lot of sharing of unlicensed music.
JQBX has created a collaboration platform for modern times (legally and all) so you can use it to share your base track with your group and let everyone do their own thing while the app takes care of the syncing.
Blend
Blend is a collaboration network which allows musicians to store and publish their projects but more importantly, it lets you “take” other musicians’ projects and modify them, make remixes and collaborate. You can also find interesting competitions where users invite the Blend community to work together through production challenges and exclusive remix opportunities.
Bandlab
Bandlab is an online DAW that allows musicians to create and record music, collaborate, and importantly, sync across platforms and devices. It’s also a centralized system where collaborators, including producers, musicians, and test groups can listen to your music privately and share feedback before you’ve finalized the track. Bandlab also includes professional beats, effects, virtual instruments, and mastering tools, and it comes with unlimited cloud storage!
Splice studio
Another service to back up your DAW projects online is Splice Studio. It also provides a big library of royalty-free music for you to get inspired, remix, or work on and expand. You can track all changes your teammates make to your project as they work and easily restore the project to any previous version.
Kompoz
Kompoz Studio is an online platform for music creation and collaboration among passionate musicians across the world. With Kompoz you can find collaboration opportunities from other artists based on your genre or instrument and you can even crowdsource your own songs and projects.
Kompoz supports most popular audio editing software and lets you easily collaborate with your band members, co-artists, colleagues or random artists from all over the world. Once you finish up a project, you can easily start selling your music on SoundBlend, directly from Kompoz.