Launched this week is the latest innovation from Finland – the country that brought us Linux and Wreckamovie – a community-based music production service called AudioDraft.
AudioDraft allows musicians to record and upload music not necessarily as complete pieces but as tracks (or stems as would be the jargon) for each individual instrument or vocal. This means a singer in Finland can work with a guitarist in Germany and a drummer in America. They each record their part, upload to the site and then the three stems can be mixed and saved as would be done with any other digital mixing program: think of AudioDraft as a cloud-based ProTools or Adobe Audition.
What could be amazing about the service is that bands are able to allow fans to mix their own tracks. Don’t like that damn bass? Think the sax solo should be louder and the drums drop out? Mix it yourself. It could be a fantastic way to build community around music artists with each fan able to tweek the original work to suit their taste.
There’s little reason why AudioDraft could not be used for film production with sound effects designers and composers uploading their work from different parts of the world. Right now this isn’t possible because there’s no picture sync but it doesn’t take much imagination to see it working in the future.
Of particular interest to indie filmmakers and others is the other service offered by AudioDraft – the work-for-hire competition model that allows musicians to submit work for payment: think 99Designs for audio work. Three competitions are running at the time of writing with prize money between $1000 and $400. One of which is a competition to create the theme music for webseries part of my Lowlifes transmedia project 
Definitely worth checking out.
UPDATED 28th July.
Although SoundCloud isn’t a collaborative platform, I thought I’d update this post and include it here because I like the social features it has in its widgets. In the picture below you can see how fans have commented at particular moments in the track, which I think is cool.
SoundCloud: The Tour from SoundCloud on Vimeo.
Posted in audience-building community crowdsourcing
