Music collaboration service Indaba has just introduced a number of new features to its site, including a new Facebook-like chat system, enhanced commenting, and a recommendation engine that helps compatible artists find each other, effectively enabling it to automatically pick out potential bandmates. The site has passed under our radar since launching in 2007, but has grown to over 125,000 thousand musicians.
Indaba is a music community for musicians looking to remotely collaborate with each other, and to share the music they’ve composed. However, while the site does make it easy to listen to what other members have created (songs can be played using an intuitive player than sits at the bottom of the screen), Indaba isn’t geared towards promoting your band and gaining fans (at least not yet).
To actually create music, users typically record their tracks using programs like GarageBand, and then upload their tracks to an online session. In these sessions, multiple users can use an integrated chat box to talk about tracks, and can also use a Flash-based mixer to rearrange pieces from each musician. At this point the exporting functionality of the service could use some work (you can only export as regular audio tracks, not as GarageBand or ProTools, though this is because of proprietary file format issues).
The site also allows users to set up payment agreements, which means you can essentially work as a studio musician from the comfort of your own home. Users can also use the site to specify the rights associated with each song.
Among the new features being launched today are in-song comments, while allow users to leave a comment with a visual indicator specifying where in the track they are referring to (for example, I could leave a note saying that I liked a certain guitar solo or drum beat). Musicians can also leave notes for their audiences that will appear when the track has reached the relevant point (I could leave a note saying, “I’m still working on this part”).
Another new feature is an enhanced site-wide chat that is similar to Facebook Chat. Using the new system, users can monitor when their friends are online, and can talk regardless of where they’re browsing on Indaba.
Finally, the site is using technology from EchoNest (an audio company out of MIT Media Labs) to generate musician recommendations. Unlike most music recommendation engines, which pair users up with songs they might like, the EchoNest system is meant to pair musicians who might work well together. The system takes both the songs you’ve previously recorded on Indaba as well as interests you’ve specified in your user profile into account.
Indaba competitors include Minimum Noise (covered here), WeMix, and Indomite.
What an innovative idea–sounds like this site really has the potential to revolutionize the music business.
Sounds like a great idea, but the music biz is so shaky….. they’re gonna need a bailout next… lol.
hello
I love the facebook like chat thing, that rocks!
Curious to see who emerges from the now-crowded music collaboration space:
-Indaba
-TuneRooms
-MixMatchMusic
-BoJam
(couple others can’t think of)
They can create idol style competitions to make it more popular and probably attract popular music labels.
I like mixmatmusic, but Im definitley going to check out Indaba after this article.
Indaba is obviously not alone in the space. Where I think it fails is in the fact that it charges members for usage above 5 sessions. They up-sell a Pro Account for anyone that wants to use the site regularly.
Competitor Kompoz (www.kompoz.com) offers unlimited usage, bandwidth, and space for free, and (IMHO) sports a better interface. Interesting space to watch.
i’ve been a member of this site for a long time as an amateur sax player…it’s super sweet and i met some of the guys there in nyc. they make a real effort to be involved in their community…i’ve tried other sites like kompoz.com and frankly they just don’t stack up, for me at least…
Brian,
Quick clarification- Indaba requires you to purchase a pro membership only if you OWN more than 5 CONCURRENT sessions.
You can join as many sessions as you like.
You can own as many sessions as you want, but only 5 can be active at the same time.
-Chris
Wow now that’s a pretty innovative piece of software. Never really thought about music collaboration.
A cool idea. Definitely should integrate more with band promotion tools (sellaband, etc). Another site that does a similar thing is ejamming.com.
More thoughts on music business at http://www.musimuse.com
Indaba is great. The competitions they have with leading musicians are amazing — 3EB, YoYo, Miss Carey.
This company is taking over the music biz, no doubt.
There are about two dozen players in the Internet Music Collaboration space. Some really interesting sites, ideas, and software. It’s a huge space that has enormous potential for the whole life cycle of music projects. We’ve been at it for over 2 years now, and are nowhere near done with all the features we want to add.
the original people at digidesign and rocketnetworks tried to make this same system circa 1993. they had the basic technology with the best digital audio workstation the socnet wasnt there yet. so really its not that innovative just evolution and still you cant make silk out of a sows ear as they say in the music industry. this will yield more crappy music. social networked content creation usually ends up creating mediocre content.
It’s always great to see activity in the online music space! As a founder of Jamglue.com, the biggest online remixing community, this all helps validate our purpose.
As we commemorate our one millionth Jamglue user (http://blog.jam...maps-and-mixes/), it’s becoming more apparent that even casual remixing can harness fans’ energy and get real exposure for the original artist. On Jamglue we’ve found that a remixing tool that’s simple for even non-musicians to use can attract millions of people who get hopelessly addicted, and go on to provide free publicity for any artists who welcome the participation.
Global Music Collaboration
Hello, I have an idea with collaborating with people from all over the world. Basically I will start off with a basic melody and upload it to youtube and give people a download link to the raw MP3 file. Anyone can come along and use that sample and add to it. They too upload a video with a download link to their version. This will keep expanding until there are quite a few versions of the song with people from all around the world collaborating on this single music project. I don’t care what genre or style it becomes; this is more of an experiment. You can use just about any software. If you can, upload your project file to share, that way there can be more variety with the music. Please link your video to the person you got the piece of track from. This could be really interesting when we see what we get in the end.
http://www.yout...h?v=hTw9PDUjdz8
Thanks for reading
- Deamonic Angel