Crates.co is what Beatport should be.
Who else of you DJs is annoyed by Beatport? Who else thinks that shop for new sound and tracks on Beatport turned into nothing else than a chore?
Some of you might think now: No! I like it there. Plenty of good sounds on Beatport to find. I’ll just go through the charts and take it from there. If you are one of these, than read no further. But if you struggle to find the actual gems on BP or even think, that there is no more good music released and all BP is doing is re-releasing old tracks, then I might have a solution for you.
A few weeks ago I stumbled over a new website called http://www.crates.co Which is, in my opinion, the Beatport like it should be.
But lets start at the beginning. The two guys behind crates.co weren’t happy how Beatport evolved over the years. Sure, Beatport is absolute eye-candy, many pictures even more little effects which make the site appear pretty cool. But, important features for longtime users (like me) are plain and simple missing!
For example: it is marked nowhere if the track that I am currently listening to is a re-release of something that came out already at an earlier point (and that I maybe already bought, ‘cause I get no notice of that). Especially if I work with the « my Beatport » function and check there for the new releases, I do not have a chance to distinguish the new releases from the re-releases. This is where Crates really does shine. Crates actually connects with the Beatport API. So you will have all the releases from Beatport (because let’s be honest : they do have the biggest selection of electronic music there is, innit?) but with some clever added features which I don’t want to miss anymore already. For example : Re-Releases or Presales are greyed out on the site. So it is obvious that this track was released already or can’t be bought at this very moment.
Another feature I love : every track I listened to, will be marked, forever. Because it is gonna save me a great deal of time in the future when I see that I’ve already listened to certain tracks (and not bought them, for obviouos reasons).
But there are another two features which I do absolutely adore: The previews on Beatport are ok, but I did spend loads of money on tracks that sounded great in the preview, but when I listened to them entirely after I bought them, I thought: No, that is not what I really want. That is why crates did implement a youtube search where you can listen to the entire track on youtube. The other feature I absolutely love is the “dig deeper” button. If I like a track I just heard, I can hit this button and it will show up a selection of other tracks that go into the same direction, but without losing track of where I where of the site. I did my shopping for music only a week ago and I filled my cart with 30+ tracks within an hour. And it never felt like a chore to me. No it was an absolute joy to navigate and play on the site. That is why I can only recommend crates.co to every DJ out there who likes the good old crate-digging! Just give it a try and browse
It's absolutely worth a try.
Regards
Frank Riel