Facebook publicly launches its collaborative music video app, Collab

Collab, Facebook’s experimental app for making collaborative music videos, is today launching out of private beta testing with a public release on the App Store. The app is one of now many projects from Facebook’s internal R&D group, NPE Team, which tests new ideas that could ultimately influence Facebook’s next steps in social media. Collab itself first emerged in late May, as the pandemic forced users to stay home and find new ways to entertain themselves online.

For musicians, the pandemic has meant the lack of live concerts, which had been a key way they connected with fans. They, too, turned to online platforms to experiment with live-streamed concerts and jam sessions in order to keep those connections flowing. At the same time, short-form videos took off, led by TikTok, which also includes collaborative features like duets and stitches, which allow users who don’t know each other to incorporate each other’s content into their own.

Collab stepped into this space with its combination of short-form video and the collaborative aspects of modern social media, but with a direct focus on music.

In the app, a “collab” is a selection of three 15-second independent videos, stacked on top of each other, that play in sync. For example, a collab could consist of a guitarist, drummer and a singer, each playing alongside each other in their respective videos. Users can either create a collab by playing along with someone else’s video or, if you lack musical experience, you can just swipe on one of the three rows to choose a different video to slot into the mix from those available.

When you first open Collab, you’re presented with an endless scrolling feed of these “collabs,” which you can swipe through to find one you want to join or mix. As you discover musicians you like to play along with, you can favorite them in the app to be notified when they post new clips. This also personalizes the main feed.

Indie pop artist morgxn is one of the musicians who joined Collab during the beta earlier this year.

“This year, I was dropped by my record label the same day that Billie Eilish [posted] about me — about my song ‘Home’ being inspiring to her song ‘Bad Guy.’ So I had this catastrophic thing happening as we were entering quarantine, while the internet was giving me this boost of confidence.”

Morgxn decided to release his song “Wonder” on Collab, asking fans to come make a video with him by playing along. That song now has 43 million streams. There’s even a Spanish-language version, thanks to Collab.

“If anything came from this year where everything kind of fell apart, I also was really inspired to find new ways to do everything,” morgxn says. “If you leap, you might find something incredibly exciting, new and fresh. That’s how I ended up on Collab, and I’m excited.”

Sarah Perez

Consumer News Editor

Sarah has worked as a reporter for TechCrunch since August 2011. She joined the company after having previously spent over three years at ReadWriteWeb. Prior to her work as a reporter, Sarah worked in I.T. across a number of industries, including banking, retail and software.

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