Sunday, January 26, 2014

Proposal: Concept Paragraph

I'm here writing today about a concept for a project that I would like to work on for my software engineering class. This project will take up a semester of work for a team of people, and I'm hoping that others will want to join me in working on this.

There are plenty of socially uploaded media sites out there, but none that focus on the needs of bands. One thing that I've always thought was necessary was a site that could act as a banding together of musicians from around the world and allow them to work together through the internet. There are millions of musicians in the world, just waiting to be recognized or just wanting to express themselves. However, it is not easy to form a band with a person in another city, let alone another country. The internet lets us connect these people in a novel way. In my site, people can upload music they've recorded or record it fresh, and tag it with an instrument and their unique username. In this way, they can upload an guitar part, for example, that they have written and thought was very cool. In a different part of the world, a drummer may listen to this piece and make a drum part and attach his part to the guitar part, forming a duo but with each part being credited to its respective writer. People can sample each other's work without stealing it, and still giving credit to the authors. The idea of an international band is realistic, with members each from a different country in the world. 
Of course, there are drawbacks to this idea. It's very complicated, and would require some knowledge of sound file manipulation. Servers would be required to hold user generated content, which in turn would cost money. And of course, the main problem would be getting it off of the ground. Because all of the content is user generated, before there are many users there would not be very much content to attract new users. This is always a big problem with sites that are community driven. However, despite these obstacles, this idea has huge potential to change the world, or at least the world of the music industry. It has the potential to realize the vision of something like Soundcloud, but allowing the freedom of collaboration. 

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