The brainchild of one unemployed Twitter devotee is a world first ? a band whose members have never even met
At January's Midem music industry conference, the internet savvy singer-songwriter Imogen Heap announced plans to create a song by crowd-sourcing material from her 1.5m Twitter followers. The idea is that, on 14 March, anyone can upload clips of music or sound, which Heap will then piece together with lyrics based on ideas gathered from a web chat with fans. The song will be released two weeks later, by which point Heap will presumably have worked out how she plans to credit people for their input (something she seemed unclear about in initial interviews).
Crowd-sourcing a song via Twitter is an intriguing notion, but Heap has already been pipped to the post by Richard Newman, a Twitter devotee from Chichester who admits to having no musical ability. Around the time Heap was revealing plans for her project in a swanky Cannes hotel, Newman decided to celebrate two years on Twitter by seeing if he could use the site to form a band and record a cover of Rod Stewart's Maggie May.
Thus, Tw1tterband was born. The project was given momentum by the fact that its launch coincided with Newman being made redundant: as he put it Tw1tterband became "a distraction from the woe". Musicians and a singer were recruited from among his followers (and their followers), as was a producer to pull all of the individual parts together. Within days the track had been recorded, a video was made and the project was well on its way to raising more than �2,000 in donations for MacMillan Cancer Support. Now, the band has recorded and released its second single, a cover of the Smiths' Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want. Johnny Marr was impressed enough to tweet a response: "Nice job. I'm touched".
Being brutally honest, the story behind Tw1tterband is probably more interesting than the group's music: there's nothing in their two songs that you wouldn't expect to hear from covers bands playing in pubs across the UK. But the project is a fine advert for Twitter's ability to forge a real sense of shared experience among strangers. As a result of Newman's idea, several dozen people who've never met have felt the joy of playing music together; something that would, until quite recently, only have been possible if they'd been in the same room.
Now it's over to Heap to see if her crowd-sourcing experiments can achieve that same true sense of artistic community and create a genuinely worthwhile piece of music.
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