Online band

An Internet band, also called an online band, is a musical group whose members collaborate online through broadband by utilizing a content management system and local digital audio workstations. The work is sometimes released under a Creative Commons license, so musicians can share their "samples" to create collaborative musical expressions for noncommercial purposes without ever meeting face to face.

In March 1996, Nora Farrell and William Duckworth began to develop Cathedral, one of the first interactive works of music and art on the World Wide Web. Their aim was to create an interactive website with web-based musical instruments that anyone could play. Also in the preliminary stages of the system, they determined that they wanted to make a place on the Web for acoustic music through a series of live webcasts and performances online.

In June 1997, Cathedral went live online. The first build of this system included streaming audio, streaming video, animation, images, and text. At the time, there were fewer than one million sites on the World Wide Web and fewer than 2% of those made any sounds.

According to the creators of Cathedral, their goals at that point were:

By 2003, Cathedral consisted of three primary components:

Social networking sites have gained a large number of users because many aspects of society revolve around computers and the Internet. The music industry itself has undergone this change as well. People are using iTunes, YouTube and MySpace Music to share the music and communicate with others. Adaptively, artists and record labels can utilize Web sites and file sharing sites to spread their music. Musicians who use the Internet can also form bands online.

Internet bands became popular in the early 2000s when music technology, file sharing and collaboration software became more prevalent on the Internet. While the extent of collaboration between bands may vary, an Internet band identifies as a band whose members collaborate on music projects via the Internet.

A growing number of websites offer people the opportunity to compose music online. They marry social networking with music mixing and uploading technology. Users decide what projects they wish to add their special touches to and how actively they want to get involved.

The advantages of joining an online band include the ability to collaborate with musicians, vocalists, audio engineers, etc. who reside in any part of the world with Internet access. Also, since many online bands do not perform or record in "real-time", it allows members to record their track (their part of a collaboration) at their leisure.

...
Wikipedia