Alex Poole

I read Don Tapscotts’s Wikinomics a while ago - (in my own interpretation) it proposes that the almost limitless collaboration which today’s internet at last genuinely enables will change every facet of how the world goes around.

Heady stuff for sure and indeed during and after reading the book my head was in a whirl of possibilities for weeks.

Pragmatically though - real world - what does this all  mean?

Well I’ve been happening upon something recently that is a perfect and bang up-to-date example…

I bought a bass guitar the other day. I haven’t played one in pretty much 20 years but thought it would be fun to get blisters again. Naturally enough to help get back up to speed I researched online bass lessons.

Sure the usual info-products are there, as in pretty much every niche nowadays, but also a world of bass lessons on youtube which people had recorded and distributed for free. Which was cool.

It gets a whole heap better though.

Turns out people aren’t just recording and uploading themselves playing Red Hot Chili Peppers covers any more.

Now they’re forming “Youtube collaboration bands” - passing tracks around, editing them up into a vid and posting the finished version. These are people who’ve never met - may never meet - and can quickly and easily form loose networks of collaboration as suits their purpose at the time.

In other words if you’re a drummer or a bass player who wants to show off their talent with a specific song, you can quickly and easily search Youtube and other networks for guitarists who’ve already demonstrated their prowess with the song you want to record, or at least a similar song. That’s the audition taken care of.

Then its a snip to contact the person, move to realtime on IM or Skype, and to send audio or video files to each other across the web.

The result could be something like this stonking version of Higher Ground.

So just think about this for a moment…

Someone with just a laptop with a webcam, an  internet connection and an instrument can now find musical partners anywhere on the planet in pretty much real time, and create a multitrack multimedia recording with them, (using only free software and services if they so choose.)

Now that is f****ng exciting!

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