You play over the most recent (eg) 16 bar repeat. At the end of each repeat, everyone gets the updated loop. It's easier to experience than describe but is surprisingly effective and bypasses a whole class of latency issues.

[1] https://www.cockos.com/ninjam/

[2] http://autosong.ninjam.com/server-list.php

I recently saw a talk of the developer who basically bootstrapped this. Open source and all, and he talked about the idea of collaboration and showed some features and forks that sounded like what you want.

The talk: https://youtu.be/BD7jQcuUOaA

Edit: and another comment alerted me to the existence of live jam sessions, so this would be a possible extension of it

https://www.bandlab.com/creation-features

https://support.apple.com/en-us/guide/garageband-ipad/chsf2f...

[1]: https://www.soloistapp.com/

With software, the code is a tool. And you can give the code away and still make money on hosting, support, enterprise sales, consulting, recruiting, whatever.

With music, the stem is the product.

If the drum loop is mediocre, nobody cares. If it's actually good, the creator usually wants ownership, licensing, royalties, exclusivity, or at minimum, attribution. But even at that level, it's trivial. Once you remove the triviality of it, it becomes art, which is the product.

People absolutely want cloud collaboration though. Shared sessions, async recording, version history, stem exchange, all of that makes sense.

But public forks of high quality musical material don't really compound the way software tools do. Most musicians are not trying to maximize downstream reuse of their riffs by strangers on the internet.

Too bad I'm lazy. RiffHub looks neat.