Music should be for everyone and surveying the existing breadth of music tools on the web today made us realize something was missing. There are limited free and open music creation tools with low barriers to entry and an easy to use interface. So we wanted to create a simple music making tool with an intuitive design for everyone to use and experiment with.

The core strategy for this project was easy to stand by and a no brainer - build a simple to use, simple to access, free music creation tool for everyone. Focusing on this and putting the user first allowed us to design and build Song Maker - a tool that is useful for anyone interested in exploring music and creating their own.

In order to execute our goal of making music more accessible to everyone, Chrome Music Lab created a series of fun, hands-on experiments. We loved hearing back from teachers who used it in exciting ways, like exploring music’s connections to science, math, art, dance, and more.

For last year’s Music in Our Schools Month, we added a new experiment to the website called Song Maker. It’s a simple way for anyone to make a song, then share it with a link—no need to log in or make an account. Anyone can instantly hear what you made, and even riff on it to make their own song. It lives on the web, so you don’t need to install any apps to try it. And, it works across devices—phones, tablets, computers.

We put a lot of thought towards making this tool seamless and friendly to use for everyone. The user interface was designed to be as simple as possible yet leave room for people to dig in, get creative and make their own unique musical creations.

Song maker was designed above all to be user first and with the hope that anyone who is curious can become creators or even just enjoy tinkering and exploring with sound. Song Maker proved to be just that and has ranged from being used as full music creation tool to simply an eye opener for anyone interested in music. We created a simple browser based experience that is easy to use and open that requires no account creation or log-in. By simply putting the tool out into the world it has grown legs of its own and continues to be a platform for inspiration and creation.

The launch was widely praised by teachers and press (Verge, Daily Dot, Pitchfork, Fader), and on social, people shared lots of creations. Even the Beastie Boys producer made a song! Song Maker had 2.4 million visits across 1.2 million users (800k of them being international users), and the page itself had 15.8 million views. The #1 embed had more than 67k views.