Music makers everywhere were eagerly trying new tools and technology to help with the challenges of teaching and collaborating with music remotely. In an effort to address this issue, we challenged ourselves to create a tool that allowed for an easy way to create the feeling of human connection that comes from playing on a shared instrument, live.

Shared Piano is a simple tool for remote music teaching and collaboration. It lets you play music together live on the web, or save a song and share it with others. You can play on MIDI or computer keyboards with up to 10 people at once. You don’t need to login, or install anything, or even read a tutorial. Just send a link to someone and start playing together immediately.

We spoke to various music educators and music creators to better understand some of the challenges in the classroom and beyond, especially in this unique time of remote learning. Through these conversations we were able to understand that there was a unique need for a tool in this space.

Shared Piano initially launched in July 2020 as a beta for a small subset of individuals allowing us to gather feedback on how to make the best tool for the target audience. In September 2020, Shared Piano launched as a Chrome Music Lab experiment on the Google Experiments platform. Chrome Music Lab was the ideal place for Shared Piano because it included a number of music related tools geared towards educators. As of March 2021, the monthly usage of Chrome Music Lab includes 4.9 million users, 11 million sessions across those users, with an average of 10 minutes per session. This is a ~350% traffic increase since January 2020. This is higher than the average session time of 3 of the most popular music creation apps GarageBand (6:25), Grooveband (7:32), Drum Pad Machine (10:04) Source: AppAnnie.

Since its launch in September 2020, the monthly usage of Shared Piano has included 1.6 million users, 2.5 million sessions across those users session, with an average of 3.5 minutes per session, monthly.