And Now For The Hockey Sticks

Beatport is a music download service I hadn’t heard about. Having recently moved from the UK where the electronica part of my eclectic taste in music (some doubt I have any taste at all) was well served by Juno and a beat-up vinyl-to-mp3 setup (seems like it’s easier to go mp3 to vinyl these days), I was struggling to find a good supplier for my trip hop/electronica/chill-out/nu jazz/progressive house/trance cravings. While Germany is a leader in producing electronic music, we certainly suck at distributing it, especially the long tail of things.

While reading up on Dialect Recordings (well worth a visit, especially the Releases goodies section and the live take on Prins Thomas at the Bus Palladium), I found that a lot of their stuff that was previously only purchasable via Juno now had a link to Beatport. Intrigued, I clicked and I think I looked up again 3 hours later, having spent EUR30 on 15+ tracks on some fine, fine electronica. The process was seamless, the flash-based site has an ok GUI (a little too Web 3.0 for me in that it is a self-contained Flash app that breaks web conventions like the Back button) and excellent content. Feel like seeing recommended playlist or charts by Tiefschwarz, Gabriel and Dresden or Minilogue? Feel like downloading old Boards of Canada or new Trentemoller? The stuff is all there. While not yet as complete as Juno, “database liquidity” is impressive and the service feels very rich in terms of guiding you to content via genres, popular downloads or recommendations by artists you like. Also, streaming is almost instantaneous, which is a really nice change from iTunes buffering. Of course, given that these are mostly remixes and original electronica content, prices are quite high $1.49 - $2.49 and EUR equivalents. No DRM, of course, and while not VBR encoded, a nice choice of MP3 @ 320 kbps, MP4 or WAV ($1/track extra). With those choices and even at those prices, Beatport easily beats ordering yet another 12″ from Juno.

While my review sounds a bit fanboi, it’s nothing against Wikipedia’s article about Beatport (hence the neutrality is somewhat disputed :p). The business case for Beatport is of course that electronica is growing and very much focused on the long tail of bootlegs, remixes and edits. A distribution platform that allows artists and labels to self-upload, manage and share rights and keeps a “fair” share of the proceeds can become a huge business in the “mega-niche” of electronic music. What a potential investment target for our US operations (or so I thought)!

Having become this excited about it, I checked VentureSource to see whether any funding had been reported and it has indeed: Insight Venture Partners put in $12M in April this year. Well done! Insight’s page on portfolio company Beatport reports 175K tracks and 5K labels. That’s a great start. Insight, if you happen to be contemplating a second round, please give us a call!

Alexa backs up that Beatport is taking off, albeit from a very low level:

So, I will leave you with three things. First, the proof that Insight’s money is being spent on the right things. Meet the Beatportal twins:

Second, the Beatport embeddable affil marketing widget (congrats on getting marketing/SEO right!):

And finally, one of the tracks I purchased from Beatport. It’s a remix of Crazy Juliet by Freeze Emotions, pretty trance-y but very much worth the EUR1.99.

Now head to Beatport and get your freak on! Or read the Beatportal to get in the mood to buy and, of course, /dance!