From blog.wired.com, Kompoz: Socially-Networked Music Creation by Eliot Van Buskirk, September 26, 2007.

Social networking is an activity in and of itself, but as the preponderance of applications and widgets on social networks indicates, things get a lot more interesting when there’s something to do other than adding friend after friend. For specialized activities like making music, it makes more sense to create an entire social network centered around the activity than to embed an application in an existing network.

We covered socially-networked music creation sites in April, but recently came across another site where musicians can create profiles and record together online: Kompoz. Anyone can create a new project on the site and upload individual tracks to it in the MP3, WMA, or WAV formats. After choosing a Creative Commons license, you can invite other users to add tracks to your project. Or, you can search the site by genre, artist/member, talent/instrument needed, keyword, tag, and/or license type to join someone else’s. Every project has its own discussion forum where participants can post ideas and suggestions for the song.

Some social music creation sites let you record directly onto the site, but with Kompoz (and some others), you download tracks into your own music creation software and then upload your contribution to the site. Although this system isn’t as convenient as recording directly into the online project, it allows for higher-quality results and allows people to use familiar, full-featured software.

Check out the dub track “Psycho Riddim,” a project started by a Floridian who is “10 and just starting to learn to play drums.” Between his original beat and all of the stuff people are adding, it’s turning into a nicely fleshed-out track (the dub genre, with its repetition and layering, seems to work particularly well for this sort of collaboration).