Kompoz - “Open Source” Music

Posted on June 20, 2007 by Guy Snir
Filed Under Open Source, Web2.0, Music |

For several weeks I have been thinking about an idea and amusing myself with the thought of realizing it.

Basically I was thinking of a way to apply Open Source concepts to music production. My vision was of:

• A Web 2.0 site were musicians collaborate on music projects
• Anyone can open a music “project” which is basically a song
• The project leader or any other member can load tracks (of drums, vocals, guitar, etc.) to a “version control” system
• The project can be branched out to make remixes based on the project’s tracks
• The projects will be released with an Open Source type license so people can play, download and use the songs
• The song production can be discussed and commented on by the community
• etc…

Basically most of the Open Source parts required to create a site like this already exists: Audacity for mixing the tracks, SVN for version control, Ogg Vorbis for audio encoding, Ampache as a web-based audio file manager , Camleon for music visualization and Creative Commons for licenses (you can replace any of the components with other Open Source alternatives out there).

So I started searching for something similar to my idea on the web and found sites with somewhat related concepts (Jam Junky, Open Music Factory and more) but they were not quite like my vision.

Great! So all I have to do is:

1. Find a top musician consultant
2. Start to integrate all the components
3. Find a savvy graphic designer to make the site look Web2.0-ish
4. Lure the first musicians in to upload some tracks

After that the site will be spread virally by the community (with a little help from PR) and it’s a sure success! (This is an overly simplified snippet of the work to be done, of course).

Alas, yesterday I stumbled upon Kompoz.com, which can be described as someone reading my mind and creating this site (only they began in February, so they thought of it first…). From my visit to their site and blog they seem to be doing a very professional job.

In this type of situation I am always ambivalent (both happy that my idea was good (?) and sad that someone beat me to it…)

I haven’t had the chance to listen to the tracks yet, but I expect that we will be hearing great music productions from Kompoz.

I wish them great success!

Guy

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