Is Beatport helping to drive the electronic music scene or falling behind as an effective contributor to its culture?
For those who don’t know, and I’m guessing it’s not many, Beatport is primarily an online music retailer specialising in selling high fidelity electronic music. Founded in 2004, Beatport started up as a small online music seller boosting a relatively small catalog of under 100 record labels. But within the first year, this number had risen to 2,700, with over 100,000 tracks available to download. The site has only gotten bigger and has since spawned its own inclusive sister site Beatportal which provides music fans with up to date news on dance music culture. With a combination of good marketing and intelligent industry collaborations the company now brings in millions of dollars in revenue every year.
One of the things that sets Beatport apart from its competitors is that you can download tracks as uncompressed CD-quality wav files. This makes Beatport an essential (legal) online marketplace from which amateur and professional DJs alike can obtain the high quality music they need for their sets. Whilst it can be said that a lot of people would probably struggle to tell the difference between a 320kbps mp3 file and its wav counterpart, if you’re really looking for premium quality there’s no compromise.
Beatport also offers a convenient preview section that lets you sample two minutes of a selected track. That’s thirty seconds more than what iTunes offers, and those thirty seconds could be the deciding factor between reaching for your wallet or deciding not to purchase a song. And to top it off, every song comes free from the restrictions of DRM (Digital Rights Management). This means that any track you download can be transferred to any device, and can be burned onto as many CDs as you like.
Beatport is obviously doing something, or a lot of things right. They remain an incredibly strong contender in an ever-aggressive industry, but there are some issues with the company and how it fits in to modern music culture that I think need addressing.
When visiting the site, the most obvious drawback to using it to acquire new music is the cost, with a lot of tracks on sale with a £1.79 price tag. In this area Beatport falls short when compared to its competitors; iTunes will let you buy most songs for just £0.99 or even £0.79, and many artists give away their music for free on Bandcamp. And yes, by paying more on Beatport you are attaining higher quality music. But is the difference in file format really justifiable for the difference in price? Whilst many professional DJs and musicians would think that it is, I fear that Beatport may be isolating new dance music DJs, those aspiring to be at the top of their game but without the finances to acquire the quality and quantity they need for their sets. I think that Beatport has become more up-market than they had intended, and this exclusivity can drive people away.
There is also something to be said for the way that Beatport chooses which artists to promote on their headline banners. This is an issue that has been covered before but one worth noting. There has been much controversy surrounding artists and labels chart-rigging by either paying Beatport or individual companies designed to illegitimately boost sales to get their songs on to the Beatport top ten charts and its front page. Although it is very hard to prove that companies like Beatport subscribe to chart-rigging, it does make you think: would Beatport rather promote genuine new talent and creative material from respected artists they think the public will want to hear, or simply encourage the highest money spinner? For new artists trying to break into the scene without support from a label, the hopes of getting their music onto Beatport (where they know they will receive high exposure) are virtually non-existent.
All of this puts a spin on public perception too. At the time of writing, six of the top ten songs on the site were hard hitting big-room tracks. This sub-genre is widely played and listened to on the festival circuit and in mainstream clubs around the UK, but I don’t think it is a clear representation of what is really popular among the widespread consumers of dance music globally. It would be impossible to account for all of the artists and genres that people are listening to around the world and what are the most popular: there are simply too many to account for all in one place on the internet.
The problem lies with the fact that Beatport is a very popular place for discovering new music as well as buying it. People who only use Beatport to discover new music are given a false perception that is not accurate of the wider selection of electronic music. Beatports choice of music is vast, but it is not definitive.
So Beatport is certainly a two-edged sword. It has the ability to enhance DJs sets with the top quality music that they need, all free of DRM, but on the other hand it can be pricey and relatively out of touch with the public. And whilst it can be a great new place to discover new music, it shouldn’t be thought of as the only place to go to discover the next big thing in dance music.
People will certainly continue to use Beatport, especially DJs and consumers with the money to buy new music, and the charts will always be affected by one thing or another. Whether this is by the kinds of people that are buying the music or by other questionable sources, it is inherently going to give the public an impression of what is ‘popular’ as long as Beatports success prevails. So while the public and people in the industry should continue to use Beatport to discover and purchase new music (if they should want to), they should know to look elsewhere too, and should take everything that they see with a pinch of salt.
Faris Sabbah
