Five years ago, I wrote for Forbes about how technology was catching up to major shifts in songwriting. Writing teams were not only becoming larger and more international, but were also embracing more remote, on-the-go recording processes, often through spur-of-the-moment Voice Memos in hotel rooms or green rooms.

Today, the COVID-19 outbreak has forced thousands of artists, songwriters and producers to do 100% of their work from home — creating an environment for studying the extent to which technology is actually in a place to normalize virtual music-making for good.

Of course, remote musical collaboration is nothing new. Several groups, such as Superorganism and rap collective YBN, have been collaborating remotely from the outset. A wide range of cloud-based tools are available at artists’ disposal, most of which launched within the past five years — from mobile-app interfaces like Trackd and SoundStorming, to DAW-sharing platforms like Splice, Blend and Spotify-owned Soundtrap.

But many artists still prefer to meet and collaborate in person. The rise of songwriting camps over the past few years underscores the value that the music industry places on this kind of face-to-face communication, and on the magic that comes from hunkering down for hours in a recording studio.

Can that magic exist in the cloud? Regardless of the answer, songwriters and producers don’t have much of a choice but to work in the cloud if they want to stay busy in the coming weeks. As Elias Leight reported for Rolling Stone, many songwriters are now hosting virtual co-writing sessions on apps like Zoom, Skype and FaceTime. All of the artists I spoke with for this piece are also using file-sharing platforms such as WeTransfer, Dropbox and Box to exchange drafts of songs, vocals and beats in progress.

One caveat I’ve only recently realized, though, is that few songwriters and producers do all of their creative work remotely.

Instead, a more common setup is that a songwriter or producer will do their first and/or last collaborative sessions of a project in person. It’s especially crucial in these opening and concluding moments to pick up on emotional and communicative nuances that might otherwise get lost online. Then, once all parties establish a sense of clarity, alignment and trust, they go remote for taking care of the rest of the busy work in the middle.

In other words, remote work can be a powerful tool for behind-the-scenes music creators — but once it takes over 100% of their workflow, many inefficiencies come into play that technology has yet to solve.