Online songwriting is both a great way to find co-writers and to actually learn the craft of songwriting. When you share the songwriting process with someone else online you can't help but learn new techniques and methods to improve your writing skills.

My favorite method of online songwriting is to write a whole bunch of ideas first, if I develop them into full songs there and then I'll put them in one pile and all my unfinished ideas into another. In a typical session I'll usually end up with 1 or 2 ideas that come out in a more or less complete form, then anywhere between 20 and 50 ideas that essentially small musical nuggets, all either on paper or recorded on my laptop. A chorus here, a lyric there, maybe a cool riff or chord sequence, a whole collection of ideas that don't yet belong to a complete song. This pile is the perfect fuel for an online songwriting session.

I'll categorize all my ideas into different folders on my computer: 'Riffs & Chords,' 'Lyrics,' 'Verses,' 'Bridges,' 'Choruses,' and finally 'Other.' I'll then put all of these ideas into a zip file and upload them to the internet using either some spare space on my website or any of the online 'dropbox' style storage sites. I'll then send out an email to my songwriting friends and get them to download my ideas, they will of course have done the same thing with their ideas and I'll download their efforts in exchange. I can't tell you what a great method this is, you'll get a whole bunch of interesting ideas from your co-writer to work on and he/she will have the same from you. Chances are when you put your heads together in this way you'll both end up with many more completed songs than you ever would have alone.

You don't have to limit it to just one co-writer either, I'll usually get 10 or more of my songwriter friends to download the same set of ideas. The more minds you can get working on your ideas the more options you have for your finished song! Online songwriting is a huge amount of fun I really recommend you give it a try!