Kollect.fm Beautifully Gathers Your Music From YouTube, Facebook and SoundCloud
Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.
Kollekt.fm aims to help music listeners corral music from Facebook, SoundCloud, and YouTube, so they can keep it all in one tidy place. The Amsterdam-based Kollekt.fm plans to let you collect music from other places in addition to Facebook, SoundCloud, and YouTube, which will be nice, because music is too hard to collect.
Your Facebook music (from the music-related groups you follow) and SoundCloud favorites show up there automatically, once you connect your accounts. In addition, a search box lets you add music from YouTube, SoundCloud, and Facebook artist pages manually.
Kollekt.fm shows a lot of promise, in part because we need more ways to keep track of the music we find, but also because the design is so nice, with clean lines, an array of differing opacities and an ever-changing yet continuously artsy and calming set of background images.
The platforms’s organization of music from Facebook is something to behold. An underrated (in this author‘s opinion) way to seek out new music from your favorite artists is to follow them on Facebook, which, alongside Soundcloud, is a popular way for artists to publicize new releases and remixes. The problem with that tactic is that Facebook isn’t really designed for that.
Kollekt.fm not only lets you see the music from your Facebook groups in a simple interface, but also lets you share songs back to your Facebook account. You can also click the Heart icon to add it to your Kollekt.fm favorites list.
The platforms Facebook integration goes a step further though as it can also follow Facebook groups that aren’t exclusively Bandpages, but may be a group you and your friends set up to share YouTube, Soundcloud or any music links (such as “Indie Rock” or “Metal Jamz”). Kollekt.fm removes all the noise, so all you see is music from those groups.
Kollekt.fm recently bulked up its playback features, giving you more ways to play all this music from any web browser (including smartphones), adding a variety of keyboard shortcuts to make controlling playback a breeze (see screenshot).
Over the last few weeks Kollekt.fm has steadily been rolling out major upgrades to its beta service, such as the ability to search for music on YouTube, SoundCloud, and Facebook artist pages. Between them, there is nary a artist, song, remix or other version of a song that you won’t be able to find.
Another new feature: the ability to see who else has posted your music to Kollekt.fm, which brings the community aspect to the fore.
Despite Kollekt.fm short list of music sources, which, its developers tell Evolver.fm will keep expanding, it shows lots of promise as an on-the-go discovery, auditioning, and collection service. We wonder how will it deal with the dead links — a problem that Cumulus.fm solves by re-searching for missing songs on other services — but regardless, it has the benefit of looking extremely polished and knowing exactly what it wants to do and where it wants to go.
You can follow Kollekt.fm and their continuing updates on its Facebook and Twitter pages.
How, or will, this interact with last.fm, which is typically how I “keep track” of my music (meaning I like services that will Scrobble for me).
At the moment we use last.fm for artist search. We are planning to integrate more of the last.fm api so a synced scrobble function is something that would make sense somewhere in a future release.