Beatport is an American

electronic music Electronic music broadly is a group of music genres that employ electronic musical instruments, circuitry-based music technology and software, or general-purpose electronics (such as personal computers) in its creation. It includes both music ...

-oriented

online music store A digital music store is a business that sells digital audio files of music recordings over the Internet. Customers gain ownership of a license to use the files, in contrast to a music streaming service, where they listen to recordings withou ...

owned by

LiveStyle LiveStyle, Inc. is a Los Angeles-based live events conglomerate founded by media entrepreneur Robert F. X. Sillerman. The company was formed in June 2012 as SFX Entertainment—the new incarnation of Sillerman's previous company of the same name ...

. The company is based in

Denver Denver ( ) is a List of municipalities in Colorado#Consolidated city and county, consolidated city and county, the List of capitals in the United States, capital and List of municipalities in Colorado, most populous city of the U.S. state of ...

Los Angeles Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of Los Angeles, ...

, and

Berlin Berlin ( ; ) is the Capital of Germany, capital and largest city of Germany, by both area and List of cities in Germany by population, population. With 3.7 million inhabitants, it has the List of cities in the European Union by population withi ...

. Beatport is oriented primarily towards DJs, selling full songs as well as resources that can be used for

remixes A remix, also sometimes called reorchestration or rework, is a piece of media which has been altered or contorted from its original state by adding, removing, or changing pieces of the item. A song, piece of artwork, book, poem, or photograph ca ...

. It also operates a specialized

music streaming service A music streaming service is a type of online streaming media service that focuses primarily on music, and sometimes other forms of digital audio content such as podcasts. These services are usually subscription-based services allowing users to s ...

oriented towards DJs. Established in 2004, the service was acquired in 2013 by Robert F. X. Sillerman's company

SFX Entertainment LiveStyle, Inc. is a Los Angeles-based live events conglomerate founded by media entrepreneur Robert F. X. Sillerman. The company was formed in June 2012 as SFX Entertainment—the new incarnation of Sillerman's previous company of the same nam ...

for a reported price of slightly over $50 million. In 2014, as part of an effort to widen its audience, Beatport expanded into original content oriented towards fans of

electronic dance music Electronic dance music (EDM), also referred to as dance music or club music, is a broad range of percussive electronic music genres originally made for nightclubs, raves, and List of electronic dance music festivals, festivals. It is generally ...

, covering EDM news and culture, and offering on-demand music streaming from its catalog and live streaming events. SFX Entertainment filed for

chapter 11 bankruptcy Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code ( Title 11 of the United States Code) permits reorganization under the bankruptcy laws of the United States. Such reorganization, known as Chapter 11 bankruptcy, is available to every business, w ...

on February 1, 2016, and Beatport was subsequently put up for sale. However, in May 2016, SFX suspended its proposed auction of the company, and cut its streaming and original content operations in order to focus on its core music sales business. SFX has since emerged from bankruptcy as LiveStyle. Beatport emerged from the bankruptcy debt free and profitable and continues to operate as an online music store.

History

2004–2009: Founding

The first version of Beatport's web store, Beatport 1.0, was released on January 7, 2004, and consisted of 79

record label "Big Three" music labels A record label or record company is a brand or trademark of Sound recording and reproduction, music recordings and music videos, or the company that owns it. Sometimes, a record label is also a Music publisher, ...

s in its catalog. Half a year later, Beatport was beginning to become recognized after a few collaborations with well-known DJs and partnerships with the technology company

Native Instruments Native Instruments is a German company that develops, manufactures, and supplies music software and hardware for music production, sound design, performance, and DJing. The company's corporate headquarters and main development facilities are lo ...

. In January 2005, a revised Beatport 2.0 was released, with a catalog of over 100,000 tracks supplied by 2,700 signed labels. Beatport was also made accessible through a scaled-down GUI embedded within DJ software:

Traktor DJ Studio Traktor is DJ software developed by Native Instruments. It is also used as a sub-brand for Native Instruments' associated DJ hardware products. History Traktor was first released in 2000. The initial versions available were ''Traktor DJ'' ...

by Native Instruments. On August 7, 2006, Beatport released Beatport 3.0 Fully Loaded, the third version of its original store, which featured improvements to navigation, customized content subscription via My Beatport, and new payment options.

2007–2008: Beatport Player

In February 2007, Beatport launched the Beatport Player, a viral marketing web widget to play back relevant content by Artist, Label, Genre, and Chart. Built using

Adobe Flash Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a mostly discontinuedAlthough it is discontinued by Adobe Inc., for the Chinese market it is developed by Zhongcheng and for the international enterprise market it is developed by Ha ...

and HTML, the player gives users the ability to create custom, dynamic playlists from song previews of Beatport's catalog to be embedded into nearly any HTML website. In August 2007, Beatport launched a community-oriented music site, Beatportal, whose stated mission is "...to provide music lovers with up-to-date information about the world of electronic music". Following up on the idea of the community-oriented site, Beatport introduced th
Beatport Music Awards
on March 18, 2008. Each year Beatport users can vote for the best electronic music artists in an effort to trace the progress of these artists over the years or determine which has the largest growing fan base. The BMAs are broken down into 19 categories, including Best Artist categories from each genre, Best Remix, and Best Single. The nominees for the BMAs are based solely on unit sales at Beatport.

2009–2012: The New Beatport

The third version of the online store, named "The New Beatport", was released on January 21, 2009. Multiple features were added to the site including embedded artwork in purchased music, a new user-preference system named "My Beatport", keyboard shortcuts and sitewide multilingual support. As a newer version of the store, it integrated the use of an

Adobe Flex Apache Flex, formerly Adobe Flex, is a software development kit (SDK) for the development and deployment of cross-platform rich web applications based on the Adobe Flash platform. Initially developed by Macromedia and then acquired by Adobe Syste ...

3 web application provided by RealEyes Media. On July 14, 2011, Beatport launched their

HTML5 HTML5 (Hypertext Markup Language 5) is a markup language used for structuring and presenting hypertext documents on the World Wide Web. It was the fifth and final major HTML version that is now a retired World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommend ...

website with new features, designs and a new platform. Beatport officially added

AIFF AIFF may refer to: * Audio Interchange File Format * All India Football Federation, the national governing body of Association football in India Film festivals * Addis International Film Festival, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia * Alexandria Internation ...

downloads as an option on their platform on September 9, 2011. The annual revenue of Beatport for 2012 was reportedly around $15–18 million, with losses of $2 million.

2013–2015: SFX, pivot towards original content

In February 2013, Beatport was acquired by Robert F.X. Sillerman's

, a conglomerate focusing on EDM properties such as festivals and promoters. Additionally, Beatport announced that it would partner with the music recognition service Shazam to index its catalog. In December 2013, the company laid off 20 employees in the Denver office and six in San Francisco, reportedly leaving the site's technical infrastructure supported by only a skeleton crew. Under SFX ownership, Beatport began to reposition itself towards the overall

culture. On January 6, 2014, Clear Channel Media and Entertainment (now known as

iHeartMedia iHeartMedia, Inc., or CC Media Holdings, Inc., is an American mass media corporation headquartered in San Antonio, Texas. It is the holding company of iHeartCommunications, Inc., formerly Clear Channel Communications, Inc., a company founded by ...

) announced that as part of a wider marketing partnership with SFX, it would syndicate a Beatport top 20 countdown show to its major-market

contemporary hit radio Contemporary hit radio (CHR, also known as contemporary hits, hit list, current hits, hit music, top 40, or pop radio) is a radio format common in many countries that focuses on playing current and recurrent popular music as determined by the Top ...

stations beginning later in the year. Clear Channel staff, including

John Sykes John James Sykes (29 July 1959 – December 2024) was an English guitarist and singer, best known as a member of Whitesnake, Thin Lizzy and Tygers of Pan Tang. He also fronted the hard rock group Blue Murder and released several solo albums. ...

, believed that the deal (particularly the Beatport countdown show) would help provide a higher level of national exposure to current and up and coming EDM artists.Clear Channel and SFX Strike Electronic Dance Music Marketing Deal
from ''

The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' (''WSJ''), also referred to simply as the ''Journal,'' is an American newspaper based in New York City. The newspaper provides extensive coverage of news, especially business and finance. It operates on a subscriptio ...

'' (January 6, 2014) In December 2014, Beatport revamped its website to extensively target mainstream fans of electronic music, adding original content (such as news articles), as well as live streaming shows and

festival A festival is an event celebrated by a community and centering on some characteristic aspect or aspects of that community and its religion or cultures. It is often marked as a local or national holiday, Melā, mela, or Muslim holidays, eid. A ...

coverage. Additionally, Beatport launched a free music streaming service, which allowed users to stream full-length songs from Beatport's library, as well as curated playlists and charts. Beatport CEO Greg Consiglio and executive creative director Clark Warner explained that only 300,000 of the site's 50 million unique users had actually purchased music from the service, and that the majority of users were using the Beatport store's time-limited samples of tracks for music discovery instead. In March 2015, the site launched a

mobile app A mobile application or app is a computer program or software application designed to run on a mobile device such as a smartphone, phone, tablet computer, tablet, or smartwatch, watch. Mobile applications often stand in contrast to desktop appli ...

, featuring the streaming service, and a "Beatport Shows" feature which highlights upcoming events and provides integrated access to ticket purchases. The streaming service is subsidized by Beatport's store, which was re-branded as Beatport Pro (in concert with the service's desktop client software) and remained primarily focused towards professionals.

2016–present: SFX re-organization, LiveStyle

Beatport incurred US$5.5 million in losses for 2015. In March 2016, as part of SFX's bankruptcy, the company announced that it planned to auction off Beatport and digital firm Fame House (the latter eventually sold to

Universal Music Group Universal Music Group N.V. (often abbreviated as UMG and referred to as Universal Music Group or Universal Music) is a Netherlands, Dutch–United States, American multinational Music industry, music corporation under Law of the Netherlands, ...

) to focus more on its live events business. On May 10, 2016, Beatport announced that the auction of the company had been suspended, and that it would instead cut back its operations to focus solely on its music sales business—resulting in the discontinuation of Beatport's streaming, live and original content operations. The company also announced layoffs as it underwent restructuring, with as many as 49 employees departing the workforce. In September 2016, Italian record label Art & Music Recording called for an investigation into allegations that third-parties had artificially inflated the download counts of several of its songs ("juicing") on Beatport, which caused Beatport to remove the songs under policies prohibiting labels from making purchases of tracks to increase their chart performance. In December 2016, SFX emerged from bankruptcy under new leadership, and renamed

. The company's CEO, Randy Phillips (formerly of

AEG Live The initials AEG are used for or may refer to: Common meanings * AEG (German company) ; AEG) was a German producer of electrical equipment. It was established in 1883 by Emil Rathenau as the ''Deutsche Edison-Gesellschaft für angewandte El ...

) stated that Beatport had returned to profitability. In October 2017, Robb McDaniels was announced as CEO of Beatport. In February 2019, Beatport announced a joint venture with digital music record pool company DJcity, forming Beatsource, a digital music retail platform aimed at open-format DJs. Around that time, Beatport had 450,000 active DJ customers and 35 million

unique visitors A unique user is a term in web analytics that refers to data of a Pageview of a unique IP, whose presence is only counted once, regardless of the number of pages they visit. This definition does not count repeat or returning users for a standard pe ...

per year. In August 2019, producer and DJ

A-Trak Alain Macklovitch (born March 30, 1982), known professionally as A-Trak, is a Canadian DJ, record producer, and record executive. He came to prominence in the late 2000s as an international club DJ and remix artist, known for incorporating highl ...

joined the board of managers as an advisor. In May 2019, Beatport announced two new subscription services tailored towards professional DJs: Beatport Link is a streaming service allowing music from the platform's library to be streamed directly into supported DJ software.

Pioneer DJ Pioneer DJ is a brand of DJ products, including CDJ, media players and DJ controller, DJ controllers, turntables, DJ mixers, headphones, effects units, and loudspeakers. Originally part of Pioneer Corporation, the company became independent in 20 ...

served as a launch partner, offering integration through its newly developed mobile app WeDJ, and announcing that

Rekordbox Cross/CrossDJ is a digital vinyl and DJ mixing software developed by the French company Mixvibes. This software provides DJs with a digital platform with which they can mix and perform their music. Since its release in 2008, it has become Mixvi ...

would support Link later in the year. Beatport also announced Beatport Cloud, which features full track playback, a management interface, and unlimited redownloads of purchased songs. In March 2021, Beatport launched a

web-based A web application (or web app) is application software that is created with web technologies and runs via a web browser. Web applications emerged during the late 1990s and allowed for the server to dynamically build a response to the request, ...

DJ application known as Beatport DJ for Link subscribers, which offers support for

Bluetooth Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology standard that is used for exchanging data between fixed and mobile devices over short distances and building personal area networks (PANs). In the most widely used mode, transmission power is li ...

and

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard, developed by USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), for digital data transmission and power delivery between many types of electronics. It specifies the architecture, in particular the physical ...

-based

DJ controllers DJ controllers are devices used to help DJs mix music with DJ software using knobs, encoders, jog wheels, faders, backlit buttons, touch strips, and other components. Overview DJ controllers are microprocessor-based control surfaces used to ...

from major manufacturers. Beatport stated that it had sold approximately 25.5 million songs in 2022, which accounted for approximately 12% of worldwide digital music sales. While the

International Federation of the Phonographic Industry The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) is the organisation that represents the interests of the recording industry worldwide. It is a non-profit members' organisation registered in Switzerland and founded in Italy in 1 ...

(IFPI) estimated in a 2023 report that global revenue from digital music sales had declined by 43.75% due to increased use of consumer-oriented music streaming services, Beatport had an increase of 35% over the same period, due primarily to its targeting of a

captive market A captive market is a market where the potential consumers face a severely limited number of competitive suppliers; their only choices are to purchase what is available or to make no purchase at all. The term therefore applies to any market wher ...

of DJs. At the same time, its streaming services had increased by 60% in the past two years. CEO Robb McDaniels cited familiarity with the streaming model among its customers, as well as a decision to lower the prices of its music downloads amid the onset of the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

in order to attract new and returning users. In May 2022, Beatport acquired the music discovery portal LabelRadar. In February 2023, it was announced that Beatport had acquired a majority stake in

International Music Summit International Music Summit (IMS) is an international conference on the electronic music industry that takes place annually in Ibiza over three days. IMS was co-founded in 2007 by Pete Tong, Ben Turner, Danny Whittle, Mark Netto and Simeon Friend. ...

Ibiza Ibiza (; ; ; #Names and pronunciation, see below) or Iviza is a Spanish island in the Mediterranean Sea off the eastern coast of the Iberian Peninsula. It is 150 kilometres (93 miles) from the city of Valencia. It is the third largest of th ...

. In 2024 Beatport launched a global DJ competition with Miller called Miller Mix.

Music catalog

At launch, Beatport offered tracks from 79 electronic music labels to customers worldwide. Over the years, the company has grown and expanded its music catalog to include more artists and differentiations of the electronic genre such as house, techno, drum & bass, and dubstep. Sales of sample packs and remix stems, in the "Beatport Sounds" section, grew from an annual revenue of $600,000 in 2010 to $39.1 million in 2015. Music on Beatport is distributed without

digital rights management Digital rights management (DRM) is the management of legal access to digital content. Various tools or technological protection measures, such as access control technologies, can restrict the use of proprietary hardware and copyrighted works. DRM ...

(DRM); songs are distributed in

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount ...

format, with the ability to upgrade purchases to lossless

WAV Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced or ) is an audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream on personal computers. The format was developed and published for the first time in 1991 ...

format for an additional fee. Beatport supports several DJ platforms, allowing DJs to mix with streaming music from its catalog. Supported software includes

Serato Serato (stylized in all lowercase; ) is a music software company founded in 1998 in Auckland, New Zealand by Steve West and AJ Bertenshaw. History West and Bertenshaw met in computer science class at the University of Auckland. When West created ...

Traktor Traktor is DJ software developed by Native Instruments. It is also used as a sub-brand for Native Instruments' associated DJ hardware products. History Traktor was first released in 2000. The initial versions available were ''Traktor DJ'' ...

, Djay, and

VirtualDJ VirtualDJ (VDJ) is audio and video mixing software for DJs for Microsoft Windows and macOS, developed by Atomix Productions. History The first version of VirtualDJ appeared on 1 July 2003. VirtualDJ is the successor to AtomixMP3, the first v ...

. Supported hardware includes the CDJ-3000, OPUS-QUAD, OMNIS-DUO, and XDJ-AZ from

/AlphaTheta and devices running Engine DJ OS, including the Prime 4, SC5000, and SC5000M from Denon DJ. Beatport DJ is an online application allowing DJing with a

DJ controller DJ controllers are devices used to help DJs mix music with DJ software using knobs, encoders, jog wheels, faders, backlit buttons, touch strips, and other components. Overview DJ controllers are microprocessor-based control surfaces used t ...

from a web browser.

Awards

;International Dance Music Awards (

IDMA The International Dance Music Awards or IDMAs was an annual awards ceremony held in Miami Beach, Florida, United States as a major part of the Winter Music Conference. The awards were held every year from 1985 to 2020, except for 2017, when the ...

) * 2006: Best Dance Music Retailer and Best Dance Music Specialty Retailer * 2007: Best Dance Music Retailer * 2008: Best Dance Music Specialty Retailer * 2009: Best Dance Music Website (awarded to Beatportal.com) and Best Specialty Retailer * 2010: Best Dance Music Website (awarded to Beatportal.com) and Best Dance Music Specialty Retailer * 2011: Best Dance Music Specialty Retailer * 2012: Best Dance Music Specialty Retailer * 2013: Best EDM/Dance Music Retailer * 2014: Best EDM/Dance Music Retailer

References

External links

*
Beatportal
Beatport's editorial arm
Beatport top tracker
{{DJ Award-Special Award for Outstanding Dedication , state=collapsed Companies based in Denver Online music stores of the United States Internet properties established in 2004 2013 mergers and acquisitions Companies that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2016 2022 mergers and acquisitions