Recent behavioral and cultural changes driven by the paradigm of mass collaboration highlighted the phenomenon of crowdsourcing as an innovative and promising production model, with positive effects in several business areas. In the field of music, the so called wave of crowds has fostered creative processes where people from anywhere in the world with Internet access can collaborate in different ways in musical productions, even not being practitioners. The present work is a study of crowd computing applications in the context of music, with an eye towards the crowdsourcing phenomena. We investigate forms of collaboration involving crowds and the available platforms. We also discuss the challenges coupled to this domain and propose a research agenda.

According to some researchers, the wave of crowds we are witnessing in recent years is another example of the challenges for the CSCW community, a line of research that fights against the dilemma of fragmentation. The reflexes of this phenomena in projects of different branches have caused a change of paradigm in how products and services are idealized and how the projects are conducted in a collaborative way. Successful examples have attracted the attention of entrepreneurs in various areas and increased the business vocabulary with terms like crowd wisdom, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and open innovation. It is a different reality from the one we are used to in the context of groupware systems, and it brings new challenges that leave some relevant open research questions. This paper proposes a characterization of crowd computing systems, contextualizing the design activity within this domain, presents a research agenda in the context of CSCW and discusses possible implications of the mass phenomena on the line of action of the community of Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design.

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