It is not clear that open collaboration using copyleft licenses provides any significant advantages in music production, as open source advocates commonly argue is the case for software development.
Several websites have surfaced to provide musicians with the platform and tools necessary for online music collaboration.
Most of these sites promote one or more of the Creative Commons licenses, allowing derivative works and sharing of the finished songs.
Early implementations of these collaboration sites relied on threaded discussion forum software and FTP to provide a means for musicians to initiate and discuss projects, and to share multi-track files.
More recent and modern sites provide robust project-management features, automatic encoding and compression, online playback streaming, web-based upload and download options, chat, and project-based discussion forums.