Beatport To Offer A Streaming Feature

In an interesting development, the DJ/EDM portal Beatport will soon be launching a new streaming service. The feature will be part of Beatport.com, which currently offers downloads of beats and songs used by DJs and EDM producers everywhere.

Contrary to what you might thing, the streaming feature is not intended to compete with other streaming services like Spotify as a "jukebox in the sky." Instead its aimed at professional DJs who want to access a library of beats and songs on the fly.

Artists and record labels will be paid if a song is streamed, since this will be a paid service, although the royalty rate has yet to be revealed. Currently the Beatport library is composed of 90% independent label material.

Beatport was purchased by SFX Entertainment in 2013, and the company has steadily tried to revamp the service. It now consists of Beatport Pro, a desktop media manager and player for DJs, and Beatport.com.

This is an application for streaming that hasn't been tapped yet, so it should be interesting to see how well it works in real life with sometimes flakey Internet connections.

Why The SFX IPO Is Bad For EDM

SFX Entertainment’s recent IPO (Initial Public Offering) seems to have met both some backlash and bad timing, as it’s stock continues to struggle to come back to its original IPO price of $13 per share. Part of this is due to the stock market having a case of the yips over our boys in Washington being unable to come together to fund the government, so there’s your bad timing. The other part is due to the IPO stock offering being on the high side to begin with, much like the Facebook IPO last year.

But the fact that we’re even talking about the stock price rather than the company’s impact on music is the problem here, and it’s a symptom of a larger malady that pertains uniquely to the entertainment business. Once a company goes public, it becomes beholden to the stockholder and not the customer, and that’s bad for a company based around a totally creative product. In this case its music, more specifically electronic dance music (EDM), where SFX has made its big play.

Just a refresher on SFX - it’s the brainchild of chief executive and chairman Robert Sillerman, who saw how EDM was becoming the next big trend in music and wanted to cash in on its popularity. The company went on a buying spree, rolling up several event producers as well as online music store Beatport, and was planning on using the IPO money for additional acquisitions of other major EDM events.

It’s great when someone has so much confidence in a part of the music industry that he invests heavily in it, and then convinces Wall Street to invest as well, but that also brings about a self-fulfilling prophecy, meaning that when big money comes into something artistic, the art inevitably gets squeezed out in favor of something safer and more likely to result in a profit. Read more on Forbes.

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