Beatport - The backlash!!

[patrick bateman]

We are all respectable people with respectable opinion. And we all have the right to express ourselves

apparently not according to hottiespacy

[isa]

hottiespacy

hahahaha, nice name

[adam]

And to Adams post above: you are talking about Beatport as if they are the only company that are doing what they are doing. Comparing them as steaks to hamburgers! What are Kompakt (for example) doing wrong in your opinion?? They distribute loads of labels as well.

Last time I checked, there were some that were different bitrates, etc. Are they all 320kbps?

I was speaking broadly anyway, could be exceptions (and i'd like to hear about them) but everything from iTunes to more underground + electronic centric distributors like bleep have been low bitrate or VBR, etc.
I won't pay for less than full quality music. If there is only one or two online/digital distributors that offer this service properly, I will grudgingly pay a little more than what perhaps should be paid until some good competition comes along.

[adam]

there is no difference between mcdonalds and a nice steak restaurant either, its still dead meat !

Well, you've voided the legitimacy of your entire post with that statement

Unless you are a vegitarian or vegan, in which case, I can understand. But if you are like me and love meat.. you know the difference between soggy fatty trash and delicious and properly prepared meal.

[patrick bateman]

And to Adams post above: you are talking about Beatport as if they are the only company that are doing what they are doing. Comparing them as steaks to hamburgers! What are Kompakt (for example) doing wrong in your opinion?? They distribute loads of labels as well.

Last time I checked, there were some that were different bitrates, etc. Are they all 320kbps?

I was speaking broadly anyway, could be exceptions (and i'd like to hear about them) but everything from iTunes to more underground + electronic centric distributors like bleep have been low bitrate or VBR, etc.
I won't pay for less than full quality music. If there is only one or two online/digital distributors that offer this service properly, I will grudgingly pay a little more than what perhaps should be paid until some good competition comes along.

Most of the Kompakt stuff is 320, I think only a very few is 256.

[adhesif]

there is no difference between mcdonalds and a nice steak restaurant either, its still dead meat !

Well, you've voided the legitimacy of your entire post with that statement

Unless you are a vegitarian or vegan, in which case, I can understand. But if you are like me and love meat.. you know the difference between soggy fatty trash and delicious and properly prepared meal.

to put it simply, music isnt dead meat! personaly, music is more like organic fruit to me !
where you can pick from different trees, and once all the fruit has been picked, its gone ! until the next season/releases !
but listen bro, you seem to think that you dont eat mass produced cheap meat if you buy your music from beatport, which is
eternaly available, just like meat is in supermarkets!
to me, music is a bit more precious than just going to the meat counter !
if you had any depth into your view of electronic music as 'meat', then your choice of meat you would find is actualy available from the underground !
but infact, you shop at mcdonalds for your music, thinking your getting the real sshhittt !

it seems to me that weve ended up not talking about underground music in this thread ! as anyone who goes to beatport to find underground music is quite frankly 'starving' themselves !
yes, ofcourse there are 'underground' artist on beatport, but as from the seed this thread grew from you got to sharpen your carving knife and realise theres a lot of underground missing on there, by being turned down by beatport or even choosing not to go through beatport !

and yes i do eat meat too, but my preference is halaal meat !

[angelica]

It´s not about wheter we want the music to be free or not. It´s about comparing the prices of vinyls vs mp3 releases.
Makes no sense for me having less costs releasing mp3s and then charging the same or more than a vinyl

precisely. i don´t think anyone wants artists to starve. and personally, i think mp3 releases aren´t expensive at all. it´s actually very cheap. i mean, it´s not the actual plastic you pay for when buying music, its the rent and food for the artist and label-people, among other things. i don´t run a label, but i can imagine there are still costs regardless of if it´s digitally distributed or not.

i mean, when you buy a 12", you usually play just one track anyway. so that´s in reality about 7-8 euro for one track! when you compare this to mp3 -prices which are very cheap. so why pay for all 3-4 tracks when you really want only one? mp3´s give flexibility and also the fact that you can easily make your own edits.

[Torque]

The best thing about mp3's for the artists and labels (especially the small time ones) is that mp3's have no manufacturing cost. When you buy a vinyl most of the price that your paying is for the actual plastic itself. This makes it almost impossible to make money if you are not well known. Any of you that have small labels know exactly what i'm talking about. If you're thinking about making money selling vinyl you better have some good sh!t because in order to make much of anything you are going to have to sell over 1000 copies and with a market as flooded with crap as this one you better have a record that can compete with the very best if you hope to make a living as a producer alone. If you're a dj you can probably bear to break even or lose a little money on it just hoping to get your name out there. Now with mp3's it tips the field in favor of the little guy. Now everybody can make money as long as they have a place to sell them.

As far as pricing goes i agree with most of you that some of the sites out there set some rediculous prices for ep's and albums. On my site we have a pricing system that gives you a break if you buy a full ep or an album as opposed to buying each mp3 by itself. So far we've found our system works in favor of the artists and the labels because people are more willing to buy in bulk when it comes to mp3s if you give them a break. For example let's say you have a 4 track ep and each track by itself is sold for $1.99 for the lower quality ones. If you were to buy the ep track by track it would cost $7.96. We put a cap on the prices of eps at $3.99 for the lower quality ones. Right there you just saved $3.97. Lets say that record only had one really hott track. Because of the price that person figured that they would buy the full ep for another $2 and get two free tracks. Now instead of making money off of one track you just made double the money as an artist just because of the pricing system. All these site out theere that are charging full price for their EP's are just either being too greedy to look beyond the intial numbers, too lazy to set up a tier system, or somebody is blowing alot of smoke up their asses and telling them that every track they have on their site is a hott one.