In the beginning of the digital age Beatport was the iTunes of electronic music. It was a place where you can get the newest and hottest electronic singles. Since 2004 it has been the cream of the crop, until 2013 that is, when the portal was bought by SFX and talked about for its financial trouble via tech media. They made massive layoffs and according to some sources Beatport is one of the less lucrative businesses under the SFX umbrella. Now with their stock going down, the company is trying to put a new twist on the site to adapt to the new times and of course make more money. Their new venture is to do a full streaming service—to create some type of Spotify for electronic music fans. As this happens I feel that the end is near for something that we grew to love and here is why.
Beatport was made by DJs for DJs.
For those who don’t know, one of Beatport’s founders was John Aquaviva. The whole point of Beatport was to have a record shop online. The idea was to have a streaming service to pick up electronic music fans and DJs at the same time, which was a little far fetched because both types of people go for the music for different reasons. The whole point of being a DJ is finding new tracks to play for a people that like electronic music. So in a nutshell, they were competing with the DJs that were buying their music.
Streaming is too mainstream
With services like Spotify, rdio, Google, xBox and Youtube, streaming is the place that every big player wants to be when it comes to music. Electronic music has a devoted underground crowd that HATES the mainstream. By doing this service you pretty much are pissing them off and getting them to go to other stores such as Stompy, Trackitdown or Traxxsource. Don’t get me wrong I love Spotify, but there are some things that you want to discover that not everybody has access to or understanding towards. That’s the beauty of electronic music.
It does not have that exclusive feeling anymore
As electronic music becomes more popular, Beatport wants to be all in, but the beauty of it was that it wasn’t for everyone. Beatport was very picky when choosing labels that were going on their site. Some labels had to wait months or years in order to publish their music. Over the years they have been choosing more quantity over quality. In the end I know this is a business and making money is the first priority. With that being said I think they jumped too early into the streaming world, even Apple is still figuring out how to ease in to that world because they know it will hurt their sales; that being iTunes. So I don’t see how SFX will be able to monetize this with the insane amount of streaming competitors putting their core costumers in the back seat. I myself will still give it some time since the service is still in Beta and to be honest they still need to work on the interface because it looks a little complicated compared to the other services. Overall I don’t think Beatport is going to die anytime soon, but it is looking like it’s getting sick and might be heading to its death bed eventually.
