I’ve been very lucky to meet some very talented people on Twitter. In addition to professional connections, job opportunities, and witty conversational partners, I’ve met a great deal of exceptionally talented musicians via the beautiful blue bird.

If you have a group of musicians talking for a long enough period of time, the topic of a collaboration is bound to come up. It’s the same case with music people on Twitter. Anytime one of my music tweeps finishes with a track, sees a new piece of gear, or has a remotely musical thought, they share it. All this sharing leads to heaps of discussions, and if musicians talk long enough, they eventually start talking about making music together.

Creating music collaboratively using the social web is a major interest of mine. I’m just in the starting stages of social media collaborations, but the potential is simply to great too ignore. We have the tools to create and share music, ideas, and structures, without ever having to be limited by geography or time zones.

My first experience with this came after I finished making a heavily sample-based tune last fall. I wanted to put together an EP of several electronic tunes, and I asked my online music friends if they would like the stems to play with, since remixes are a great way to round out an EP. I sent them to a handful of people and waited to see if anyone planned to make anything out of them.

Here is the track as it was originally conceived:

About a month later, my Twitter friend, @AxelTheSleff, sent me a tweet saying he had completed a remix of the track and wanted my thoughts on it. I gave it a listen and was blown away with what I heard:

(His Original Tunes are also awesome. Do yourself a favor and check them out if you are a fan of music.)

After hearing this, my first thought was to make a remix of the remix, using portions of the new song not found in the original. If this process were handed over a few times, you could create an organically developing and thematically unified album. A sort of cross continental exquisite corpse style of composition that could accommodate any number of creative individuals. The project would cease to be about the creative vision of just one person, and would take on a life of its own.

I’ll make a point to keep everyone up to date with this project, as well as to showcase other examples of social media collaboration in the artistic sphere. If you know of any interesting online collaborative projects, or you are working on one yourself, don’t hesitate to contact me and let me know about it. There is so much potential for artistic expression with the social tools of the web that it has to be utilized.

Mr.  David Benson is a social media analyst and coffeephile. He currently lives in New York City and works as an analyst for Mashwork, a social media analytics company.