Strategies for facilitating creative music collaboration online

Online collaboration between musicians in 2020 is a rapidly developing practice due to a range of environmental, epidemiological and creative motivations. The technical facility to collaborate in a variety of different formats exists via file-sharing services, video conferencing suites and specialist music services such as Splice and Auddly. Yet, given this proliferation of technologies, little attention has been paid into how creative musicians can most meaningfully utilize these new collaborative opportunities within their working practice. In this article, we wish to share some reflections from a case study of online music collaboration gained through our experience of facilitating three online songwriting camps with students from Leeds Conservatoire in the United Kingdom and Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Denmark. This article will particularly focus on the importance of managing roles, the impact of communication tools and the requirement for time management when collaborating online before proposing a set of guidelines derived from this study to help enable productive online creative collaboration.