A Social Network for Making Music

Maria Limperos is a closet chanteuse. Several nights a week, after her kids and husband nod off, the pharmacist from Columbus, Ohio, takes her iPhone into her bedroom closet and opens an application called Sing! Karaoke. Under the user name Maria66, she has recorded about 1,000 songs over the past two years—some covers of hits such as Killing Me Softly and Total Eclipse of the Heart, some original songs. She’s recorded duets with strangers as far away as Australia.

Limperos is one of roughly 125 million people who use social music-making apps from Smule, a five-year-old startup that takes users a few steps beyond conventional karaoke or button-mashing video games such as Guitar Hero. The San Francisco-based company’s 18 mobile apps, which also include Guitar!, Magic Piano, and AutoRap, have spawned online communities creating music that falls somewhere in quality between the amateurs on YouTube and artists on the radio, says Chief Executive Officer Jeff Smith. “Most of the songs are quite bad, but some are pretty good, and now we’re enabling people all over the world to listen to them,” says Smith, a doctoral candidate in computer music at Stanford University. “We’re making the Internet a big campfire.”