Right, so if you’re anything like me, you’ve got music scattered across more platforms than you care to admit. A Discogs collection that’s been quietly growing since before most streaming services existed, FLAC files buried on a hard drive somewhere, a Bandcamp tab that never fully closes, and a Spotify account you’ve convinced yourself is just for background listening. Then there’s the Bluetooth situation. Multiple devices, multiple accounts, and someone always hijacking the speaker before you’ve even found what you were looking for.
Crates has a go at sorting all of that out, and we’ve been spending some time with it to see how it holds up.
The premise is straightforward enough. Pull everything into one place, local files, your Discogs collection, YouTube playlists, Spotify, Apple Music, Bandcamp favourites, and manage it all from a single app. Playback covers the formats that matter, FLAC, AIFF, WAV, mp3, AAC, with in-app streaming from YouTube, Bandcamp and SoundCloud so you’re not constantly flicking between tabs mid-dig. BPM, key and waveforms are calculated automatically, metadata and artwork get pulled from Discogs and other sources without you having to do much, and for DJs there’s a Rekordbox export function that removes one of the more annoying steps in set preparation.
In practice, it works well enough that you immediately understand why someone built it. The interface is clean, the library organisation makes sense, and having everything in one searchable space is genuinely useful when you’re the kind of person who finds a reference track in a YouTube comment, bookmarks it, and then can never locate it again. That problem, at least, gets addressed.
Where it gets more interesting is the Gems feature, a community discovery tool where users post underrated or obscure tracks with context and tags, and others can browse, reveal or pass on them. It’s a deliberate alternative to algorithmic recommendations, which in theory is exactly what this community should want. Whether the user base grows large enough to make it meaningfully useful is a question worth watching.
There’s also a guest curator playlist series that’s just launched, inviting selectors from around the world to share picks with personal notes. Again, the instinct is right, and it aligns with how most of us actually discover music we trust.
But there are fair questions to ask here, and we’re going to ask them. The most obvious one is around data. If you upload your collection to Crates and the servers go down, or the company folds, or the business model shifts three years from now, what happens? Do you lose everything you’ve organised and uploaded? Right now that answer isn’t entirely clear, and for anyone who’s spent years building a library, that’s not a small concern. The same goes for long-term pricing. It’s currently in public beta, free to use at the base level with a supporter tier for features like mobile sync and Gems, but how that evolves once the beta phase closes is worth keeping an eye on.
None of this is a criticism aimed specifically at Crates. It’s just the reality of trusting a relatively new platform with something you care about. They’re sitting at close to three thousand users, they’ve been selected for the Music Tech Europe Academy 2025-6 cohort, and the product clearly has momentum. But these are the right questions to be asking at this stage, and a team worth backing will have thought about the answers.
What we can say is that day-to-day, as a tool for people who move between multiple apps just to listen to their own music, it solves a genuine problem. Stopping the constant shuffle between Bandcamp, Spotify, a local file player and whatever else has crept into your setup is worth something on its own. My only issue is, that there is no Android App to use, which obviously, as that user, it makes it difficult to use when away from the laptop. It’s not finished, it’s still being shaped, and there’s more to come. But the direction is right, and for those of us who’ve been waiting for something built with the actual collector in mind rather than the casual listener, it’s worth getting on board now and seeing where it goes.
The only question now is, how do we get a Decoded playlist on there?
But, have a try at crates.app
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