The Japanese disaster had rightfully gotten a great deal of attention across the web, and many individuals and companies decided to get involved, lending a helping hand through direct donations. The latest one is AudioDraft, a music crowdsourcing platform. Originally launched as an academic project at Finland’s Aalto University, and founded as a company only last year, the fresh start-up came up with a pretty original way to facilitate donations through crowd-sourcing musicians.

AudioDraft is pushing the concept (though still in beta) as platform built around asking contributors to send their musical creations. The top 5 songs will be released on iTunes, Amazon as well as others, and all the proceedings will go to aid tsunami victims.  “The aim is to reach $100,000 in donations to the Red Cross Japan Aid. AudioDraft will start by donating $1,000 and we will donate additional $1 per song submitted to this contest.”

Users can Like the songs they favor, spreading the content and its cause across the social web. Moreover, AudioDraft also added another layer  by releasing a 128 600p x 900p banner pack, available here, to allow users to link back to the campaign page, and spread the word more effectively.

Many tech companies and web start-ups are doing their part in growing the Japan relief efforts, and Microsoft is one of them. Bing posted a tweet saying it will donate $1 for every retweet of their original message, up to $100,000 – but this move got some bad publicity, with some claiming Microsoft is trying to benefit from the buzz. Social game environment WeeWorld will donate 100% of March’s proceeds to aid Japan, and this follows a similar move by Zynga as well as the Mobile Giiving Foundation. Another start-up with a creative way of raising funds for Japan, and getting the word out about its service, is social marketing tool Ubershare at SxSW.