The company is based in Denver, Los Angeles, and Berlin. In an ideal world, we can get away from the corporate intrigue and media analysis around us and focus on our partnerships with labels and our role in getting the right music to the right person.Beatport is an American electronic music-oriented online music store owned by LiveStyle. Right now, there is a real resurgence in underground dance music and I'm excited to see eight of the top ten charting labels on RA this year are selling more on Beatport this year than last. What's the best-case scenario in terms of things unfolding from here?Įveryone here is focusing on the store, returning to what we do best, which will be of great benefit to all the labels we serve, the majority of which are smaller independents. Chris Nicholls from the consulting firm managing the SFX restructuring, FTI Consulting, is interim CEO with Greg Consiglio still involved in an advisory role. There's also been some changes in management. The teams focused solely on news and video are obviously no longer with us. We did close the LA and Amsterdam offices, but some of those who were working in those locations are now working remotely. There were very few changes in product development and tech support. The current staffing situation is focused on the store, as you can imagine. So we're all extremely motivated to make this the best damn music service for DJs in the world, and hopefully be so successful with it that we can bring back some of the employees we had to let go.Ĭan you give us some details about the current staffing situation? We're all very proud of the store and the position it has in the music landscape. Obviously it's also tough to see some of our co-workers and friends leave, but we need to apply our financial resources where they create the most value for Beatport and our customers. We were doing a lot of different things across streaming, video and news that were interesting, so it will take a little time to refocus the team. I think people are generally relieved that we can now focus on doing what we do best. What is the mood like at the company right now? I can't provide all the details just yet, but we are adding some significant new parent genres to the store, and reorganising some of the sub-genres across them accordingly, which we hope will satisfy the community. Underground DJs don't want EDM tracks in their genres and vice-versa. One thing is clear, people want genres that are clean and up to date. But probably the biggest thing we're working on that I'm sure everybody is interested in seeing is a change to our genre classifications. We're prioritizing those now and expect you'll see some noticeable changes in the very near future. Speed aside, there are a number of features from the Classic version of the store that the community has asked us to bring back through our Uservoice Forum. Improving this has been a priority and I'm happy to say the site is running over 50% faster since the beginning of the year, with more improvements on the way. It had a lot of issues with load time and time to interact. The new version of the store that we launched last year wasn't better than the old version. We've already put a lot of work into site speed and responsiveness. What plans have you got in terms of improving the digital download service? The services we discontinued seemed like great ideas at the time but we have realised that trying to compete with the Pandoras and Spotifys of the world was draining our valuable resources and taking away from our focus on our core customer base, the DJs. We want to best position ourselves to continue to support and serve that creative community. We operate the largest electronic music store in the world, and it is one of the most important sources of revenue for a lot of independent dance labels. While we'll always keep an eye out for areas of expansion and new features to surprise the community we serve, we also have to listen to what they're telling us and respond accordingly.įinally, we have to operate in areas where we have what it takes to be a market leader. Second, this is something that our core customers have been asking for. We'd rather do one thing better than anybody else than offer another me-too service. This means we're also able to focus on one customer-DJs-who are the foundation of what Beatport is and always has been. We're now able to dedicate all our resources to the store, which is what we are known and loved for. It looks like you guys are stripping things down to the core Beatport offering of digital track sales.
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