Creating customized soundtracks for a brand or a product is not as easy at it seems. You need to find a professional, go through dozens of samples and spend a lot of money and time on it. Audiodraft makes the process a piece of cake: it crowdsources music production to its community of amateur and professional musicians. Their service works through contests: companies that need any type of customized audio file set up a competition on Audiodraft's website with a monetary reward for the winner. An average competition lasts between 2-4 weeks and receives around 50 entries. Since Audiodraft's public beta launch in July 2010, they hosted 42 contest with some well-known Finnish companies like Marimekko, YLE, Microtask, Salomon and GameHouse. This week they are launching their first contest with Nelonen Media, one of Finland's biggest media houses. Nelonen is looking for an audio identity pack for their brand and are cashing out $2,400 for the winning entry.

Each of Audiodraft's founders (Tommi Koskinen, Arto Tolonen and Teemu Yli-Hollo) has background in music production, which means they are quite well connected with the artists. That is what helped the initial formation and growth of their creative community. On top of that, Audiodraft integrated their service with SoundCloud earlier this year, which majorly increased their community of musicians and sound designers, now 4,000-strong and growing.

Audiodraft motivates artists to join and contribute to the community by offerring them opportunities to build their portfolio through work with well-recognized brands. Naturally, monetary prizes for contests play a role too.

Artists that are part of the Audiodraft community come from over 50 countries. Major geographical user-groups are USA, UK and Finland, each accounting for 25% of the whole community.

Audiodraft emphasizes the importance of keeping the artists satisfied and active: 'Having a large community means that community management plays a big role in our service. We actively discuss with our community about the service and we also offer our community additional challenges that allow them to receive critical feedback on their work and help them polish their production skills.'

Apart from big companies, Audiodraft also helped local educational institutions like Aalto University and Metropolia to design their audio brand, as well as worked with Phil McKinney (VP and CTO of HP) to crowdsource his personal audio brand.

Audiodraft charge $99 for creating a regular contest plus a 10% comission from the prize money set in the contest. Brands can also set up sprint contests that can close at any given moment as soon as the winning entry is found. Though hosting a contest like that would cost them an extra $50. On top of that, Audiodraft offer customized contest sites like the one they set up for the Nelonen Media's competition.

Customized audio production space is currently dominated by music production houses and stock audio services. Audiodraft is almost the only company that applied crowdsourcing model to the business, which gives them the benefit of being the first but also makes it more difficult to sell their service to the traditional businesses.

Nevertheless, Audiodraft has been doing a remarkable job at least in the Finnish market. Though the service is global by its nature, Audiodraft now needs to attract well-known brands from bigger markets like US or UK to help them grow further.