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Bojam Applies Open Source Principles to Music

We've written several times about efforts in the music community to apply open source principles to music. For example, Radiohead open sourced a music video recently, resulting in many creative variations on the original video. Now, Bojam is making waves for its invitation to people everywhere to collaborate on mixing and recording original or popular music. Here's how it works.

You can find an interesting video of Bojam's founders presenting the application at TechCrunch 50 here,  and you can join the beta program for the application. The central application in Bojam resembles ProTools, the software now used by countless professional musicians to mix and edit music. Like ProTools, the application's Bojam Mixer lets you adjust thermometer-like toggles to alter the sound of mixes and capture collaborative recordings.

On top of the recording and mixing features in Bojam, though, there is a wiki-like platform for sharing song information, tablature for instruments, and lyrics with other musicians around the world who may want to collaborate with you on song creation.  Bojam's founders compare the application directly to open source software collaboration in general, citing Firefox and Linux as inspiration.

Of course, Bojam isn't the first time that anyone has solicited grassroots online music collaboration. The band Nine Inch Nails, and especially front-man Trent Reznor, has invited its audience to submit remixes and original musical parts to online forums. Some of the best mixes and parts have been included on Nine Inch Nails' records, with citation of the contributors on the liner notes--a global jam session. Nine Inch Nails and Reznor have been so pleased with the results that they're now even sending out surveys asking what fans want. Not all rock stars live in ivory towers.

• Bojam

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