Beatport cuts round two.

[Ronny Pries]

It was way about time they do something about controlling the quality of the music in their repertoire.

WAY about time!

[Atheory]

PS: Juno now They'll really take anyone. I heard unmastered stuff on that. Appalling.

i'd take unmastered and interesting over slick and boring/compressed to bits, everytime.

[AVX23]

What do people expect tho eh ? They are a corporate buy in on techno/house, diluting it to their own taste.

Personally I wouldn't p1ss on them if they were on fire, but I don't see much point in slating them tho, they are efficiant with what they do and completely above board, If you don't want stung by their corporate w@nkery - then don't deal with them.

+1

it's a bit sad that they're so popular. I can understand in the 60s/70s the need for corperate assistance... you needed big money for record studios/physical distributions, and to spread word of sounds. But in the age where as musicians we're basically going it alone with all the tools in our own hands, I don't see why it's necessary for them to be so popular.

I can imagine they can pay a large amount their running costs from advertising revenue alone. I certainly can't imagine them being poor, put it like that.

I saw Kompakt-mp3 had been taken down referring people to beatport which made me sad, but I guess it's in their interests somehow cos they're not stupid people there.

beatport seems to be operating through some weird monopoly from laziness. it's true they're good and efficient at what they do, but I find that business sense doesn't mix well with weird people doing their own thing cos they want to.

I'm just helping to start a small digital label and we're gonna try out using only paypal for purchasing. as a small label with different music it makes no sense for us to be using beatport. paypal take 20p & 3% approx per transaction, which is far far less than beatport plus another middle man.

spreading our sounds won't be easy, but doing weird musics being on beatport wouldn't help us anyway. we're gonna try the archipel style free 192 mp3 on a netlabel tip and but to have to pay for 320s/wavs. This seems to be like a nice combination of getting music into peoples ears for free, spreading word of what we're doing with a little try before you buy friendliness, but to be able to get a little cash for our efforts if people are wanting high quality.

I guess for bigger labels it makes business sense to go through beatport, but from my point of view, they can go fck themselves.

we are considering using these guys to host our wavs and 320kb mp3's
for sale from our site;
check it out.
www.payloadz.com

beatport havent dropped my label, and yet we only released one ep. in the whole of 2008 ( and it didnt sell thousands, far from it)
so i'm not sure that money is the only issue with them, it's easy to assume that of course.

Checking these guys out now, looks good !

Keeping mindtours on Beatport is still a shrewd and calculated move by them, it's called retaining a little bit of credibility - hehehe

[pheek]

I understand everyone's view here and i think we already discussed all that a few times in the past. But one sure thing, my label wouldn't be the same without Beatport.

They're big, they're dealing with more success they thought they would get at first and i think there's people on board that might be power hungry. Still, they give to label much more money than CD/vinyl distributor can ever give and represent much more of a fair trade.

If i was cut down, I'd focus on an aggregator to work solid on all other shops. I can't believe that if you do, let's say "OK", on beatport and get cut down, that you can't reach people with the 200+ shops out there. iTunes new policies might be a really good alternative soon or later.

[oblioblioblio]

From an idealistic point of view I think it's possible to be selling tracks successfully from your own websites.

I understand this has been discussed, and obviously in your situation has been tried already, but anyways, it's an important topic so hopefully people don't mind me blabbering crap for a little while...

I don't expect the music I plan on releasing to sell itself from being in any charts. Any success will come from word of mouth, and so being on one specific retailer won't bring my anymore sales. and in this situation I don't need a retailer who are taking such a large cut. I just need to be able to transfer money and have an automated sales process.

One of the strengths in the whole internet situation is that is has made everyone's voice exactly the same volume (in theory anyway). Even though the supermegastore can have bright lights, with the internet it is possibe for the weird but friendly people down an alleyway to get the same number of people through the door.

A lot of my experiences on the internet have made me believe in this.

The monome guys for example, also independant plugin developers like U-He and many others, also lots of other people selling little things becuase they have passion for them. This has been a magical experience for me after growing up in England, where passionless business success has meant every town centre looks exactly the same.

Obviously people aren't stupid and will continue to do what's best in their opinion. For me this is having a little crack at selling independantly.

[pheek]

From an idealistic point of view I think it's possible to be selling tracks successfully from your own websites.

The monome guys for example, also independant plugin developers like U-He and many others, also lots of other people selling little things becuase they have passion for them. This has been a magical experience for me after growing up in England, where passionless business success has meant every town centre looks exactly the same.

Selling from your own website is a pain and doesn't work too well. You need to have a lot of traffic and interested/devoted people. It's sort of a pain for a new customer to register and such, not everyone is dedicated in supporting! I tried it and we barely sold for 10 euros a month.

I believe one solution would be to have an association of labels that have shops and that all shops see each other's material, that you can buy around... I had this concept in mind for a while.

As for the Monome: it works well because its an exclusive product... you can't download on torrents!

[oblioblioblio]

Selling from your own website is a pain and doesn't work too well. You need to have a lot of traffic and interested/devoted people. It's sort of a pain for a new customer to register and such, not everyone is dedicated in supporting! I tried it and we barely sold for 10 euros a month.

I believe one solution would be to have an association of labels that have shops and that all shops see each other's material, that you can buy around... I had this concept in mind for a while.

As for the Monome: it works well because its an exclusive product... you can't download on torrents!

Yeah I was familiar with your situation. But possibly having tracks for sale on beatport as well had an impact on this. And obviously going it alone in selling yourself didn't help (i.e. no-one else was doing it).

The tide was flowing against you but I think a lot of that was bad luck.

Music too is an exclusive product. I will go out of my way to find a particular release if I am seriously feeling it.

I guess beatport though, taps into a much wider audience, and I can totally understand why it would be a very helpful thing for many labels.

I think the collective thing is worth looking into somehow, maybe even if it's just from having a similar approach to retail like those payloadz guys (where I think you need to register as a customer to use). I think one of the reasons for beatports success is from familarity.

If people are familiar with going to an individual labels website and using 1 partiular method to buy tracks, then maybe maybe that could become the highway that is attracting a wider audience.

The joint shop approach would be wonderful I think but would require foresight to implement well.

I definitely believe that as label owners or whatever we have a lot of power in our hands. It's weird becuase of the way music is successful... it depends on so many strange and unusual factors. But I think with an interconnected community that is being honestly and passionately covered by popular media like websites, that it would be more than possible to retail successfully on our own terms.

Ah I dunno, I'm just thinking out load. Maybe I'm being silly but for my own situation, seeing as how I had intially planned on the label thing being a full netlabel there isn't too much at stake for me by trying this.

[oblioblioblio]

As for the Monome: it works well because its an exclusive product... you can't download on torrents!

also lol at this, heheh.

but to be fair they have been battered for going it alone based on belief & intergrity alone.

Those things are sold orginally at cost price + a little bit, but the demand for them is way higher than they can make in an ethical fashion, But still they keep their values and keep the prceis and their methods the same.

I'd imagine that the profit made by all the people reselling them on ebay is way way higher than monome have made themsleves.