An Internet band, also called an online band, is a
musical group
Musical is the adjective of music.
Musical may also refer to:
* Musical theatre, a performance art that combines songs, spoken dialogue, acting and dance
* Musical film and television, a genre of film and television that incorporates into the narr ...
whose members collaborate online through broadband by utilizing a content management system and local
digital audio workstation
A digital audio workstation (DAW) is an electronic device or application software used for Sound recording and reproduction, recording, editing and producing audio files. DAWs come in a wide variety of configurations from a single software pro ...
s. The work is sometimes released under a
Creative Commons
Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...
license, so musicians can share their "samples" to create collaborative musical expressions for noncommercial purposes without ever meeting face to face.
History
Cathedral
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:
* To create an imaginative, ongoing artistic experience that builds community.
* To blur the distinctions that separate composers, performers, and audiences.
* To offer each individual listener the ability to create his or her own unique work online.
By 2003, Cathedral consisted of three primary components:
* A website that featured a variety of interactive musical, artistic, and text-based experiences.
* A group of virtual instruments that allowed listeners to participate actively and creatively.
* An Internet band that gave periodic live performances and offered listeners focused moments in which to come together and play music in community online.
Current scenario
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.
Advantages
The advantages of joining an
online band include the ability to collaborate with musicians, vocalists,
audio engineers
An audio engineer (also known as a sound engineer or recording engineer) helps to produce a recording or a live performance, balancing and adjusting sound sources using equalization, dynamics processing and audio effects, mixing, reproduction, ...
, etc. who reside in any part of the world with
Internet access
Internet access is the ability of individuals and organizations to connect to the Internet using computer terminals, computers, and other devices; and to access services such as email and the World Wide Web. Internet access is sold by Internet ...
. 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.
Education through online music collaboration
In addition to setting a platform to creatively collaborate with other musicians, online music collaboration gives opportunities to educators and students that were not possible before its conception. This platform provides an alternative to the traditional 1:1 music lesson, but its effectiveness on a higher scale is questionable.
Research conducted in 2007 at
Boston University
Boston University (BU) is a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. The university is nonsectarian, but has a historical affiliation with the United Methodist Church. It was founded in 1839 by Methodists with its original campu ...
led by
musicologist
Musicology (from Greek μουσική ''mousikē'' 'music' and -λογια ''-logia'', 'domain of study') is the scholarly analysis and research-based study of music. Musicology departments traditionally belong to the humanities, although some mu ...
and comparative educationist
David G. Hebert
David G. Hebert (; born 1972) is a musicologist and comparative educationist, employed as Professor of Music at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences (Bergen, Norway), where he leads the Grieg Academy Music Education (GAME) research grou ...
provided five key challenges for online music education programs:
# Prejudice regarding the legitimacy of online degrees
# Coordination between distance education and music departments
# Pressure to maximize profits at the expense of educational quality
# Management of adjunct music instructors
# Management of student behavior and provision of student services
To address these challenges, Hebert pointed out the importance of expert mentors, outstanding research theses completed online, a strong record of graduate job placement from online programs, detailed planning between instructors and music departments, and the implementation of assessment moderation systems.
Collaboration
Online music collaboration is an Internet-based system designed to help coordinate online music projects. Most platforms provide a virtual space to upload recorded music files, a community forum where members can offer feedback or make alterations to the uploaded music.
Each musician usually needs to record to a click track or metronome and upload the instrument or vocals for the song independently. Then a designated Internet music producer can edit for timing and tightness between all tracks, arrange, optimize and mix all instruments together and do a final mastering process to get a complete song out of single tracks.
Related phenomenon
Internet-based music collaboration can be done by individuals who never form one permanent band. The
Playing for Change
Playing For Change is a multimedia music project, featuring musicians and singers from across the globe, co-founded in 2002 by American Grammy award-winning music producer/engineer and award-winning film director Mark Johnson and film producer/ph ...
Foundation is a musical charity that releases music recorded by musicians from all around the globe, only some of whom have gone on to play together live. Even more decentralized collaboration happens between YouTube users; one ''
Cracked
Cracked may refer to: Television
* ''Cracked'' (British TV series), a 2008 British comedy-drama television series that aired on STV
* ''Cracked'' (Canadian TV series), a 2013 Canadian crime drama series that aired on CBC
* "Cracked", a Season 8 ( ...
'' columnist praised the cover of the ''
Game of Thrones
''Game of Thrones'' is an American fantasy drama television series created by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss for HBO. It is an adaptation of ''A Song of Ice and Fire'', a series of fantasy novels by George R. R. Martin, the first ...
'' theme performed by violinist Jason Yang and guitarist and sound engineer Roger Lima and directed by Paolo Dy.
Examples of Internet bands
*
subatomicglue was one of the first internet bands, forming in the late 1990s.
* The ClipBandits, known as "the first Internet band", collaborated without ever having met each other, were featured on ABC World News and ''
Good Morning America
''Good Morning America'' (often abbreviated as ''GMA'') is an American morning television program that is broadcast on ABC. It debuted on November 3, 1975, and first expanded to weekends with the debut of a Sunday edition on January 3, 1993. Th ...
'', and ultimately met and performed on
the Tyra Banks Show
''The Tyra Banks Show'', also known as and shortened to ''Tyra'' or ''The Tyra Show'', was an American talk show hosted by Tyra Banks that aired from 2005 to 2010.
While Banks's show covered a variety of topics, there was a sensationalized focus ...
.
*
Infant Annihilator
Infant Annihilator are an English deathcore band formed in Hull, East Riding of Yorkshire in 2012 by drummer Aaron Kitcher and guitarist Eddie Pickard. The band are known for their technical, eclectic and extreme musical style; parodistic and ...
; a three-member
deathcore
Deathcore is an extreme metal subgenre that combines death metal with metalcore. The genre consists of death metal guitar riffs, blast beats, and metalcore breakdowns. While there are some precursors to the concept of death metal fused with met ...
band; two instrumentalists living in
Kingston upon Hull
Kingston upon Hull, usually abbreviated to Hull, is a port city and unitary authority in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England.
It lies upon the River Hull at its confluence with the Humber Estuary, inland from the North Sea and south-east ...
, UK and vocalist living in
Florida
Florida is a state located in the Southeastern region of the United States. Florida is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the northwest by Alabama, to the north by Georgia, to the east by the Bahamas and Atlantic Ocean, and to ...
, US. Their original vocalist was from
Indiana
Indiana () is a U.S. state in the Midwestern United States. It is the 38th-largest by area and the 17th-most populous of the 50 States. Its capital and largest city is Indianapolis. Indiana was admitted to the United States as the 19th s ...
, US and recorded his vocals for their debut album without ever meeting the other two members.
*
Red Abbott
Red Abbott was a band whose members were based in New York City, Boston, Massachusetts, and Portland, Maine. They created electronic rock by emailing elements of songs to each other. Their debut album, ''Having Fun Without You'', was released in ...
; a
Boston
Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...
based band that collaborated exclusively through email on their debut album.
*
Superorganism
A superorganism or supraorganism is a group of synergetically interacting organisms of the same species. A community of synergetically interacting organisms of different species is called a holobiont.
Concept
The term superorganism is used mo ...
's members originally met up in online forums and through mutuals before eventually meeting up in real life.
See also
*
Virtual band
In entertainment, a virtual band (also called a virtual idol, virtual singer, virtual group, cartoon group, cartoon idol, cartoon singer or cartoon band) is a band or music group whose members are not depicted as corporeal musicians, but animat ...
References
{{reflist
Types of musical groups
Virtual communities
Musical terminology
Computer-mediated communication