Recently reaching one million downloads, Beatport is the premier digital music store for DJs and music lovers. Launching in 2004 with 79 record labels on board, that number has grown to nearly 4000. With the launch of Beatport 3.0, the store brings new features such as My Beatport, what other users bought, and integration with Native Instruments Traktor software.
DJ Ron Slomowicz: Where did the original idea for Beatport come from?
Jonas Tempel (CEO of Beatport): A friend of mine, Eloy Lopez, came to me because he had
purchased Final Scratch. He loved the software but he had to buy
vinyl, record it to CD, and then rip it back to the computer. He
asked if there was anyway we could just sell music online. Our
thought was, well, it starts digital, and then it goes to vinyl, we
should be able to intercept it while it's still digital and try to do
something with it. I owned another company called Factory Design, an
interactive agency with the know-how from the marketing and the
intellectual point of view to try to make this, and so we just decided
to go for it. We came up with a business plan and I had a
relationship with one of the investors of Apple and we gave them our
business plan. We tried to get some investment from Apple into
Beatport in the form of hardware because the X-serve technology had
just come out. All of our customers are by and large Apple users and
our potential customers are Apple users, so it would be cool if it
said powered by Apple on there. We submitted to them a proposal and
they turned us down and then two weeks later they launched the iTunes
Music Store. We realized they'd been working on this for quite a bit
longer than we had so it wasn't in their best interest to help out
anybody else.
RS: That brings up a big difference, Beatport seems to be more
aimed at the DJ and iTunes is more aimed at the consumer markets.
Beatport: For sure, Beatport is a niche market player. So iTunes,
at first we were obviously pretty shocked but then we realized what a
great opportunity it was because iTunes was going to evangelize this
big space and say downloading digital music was legitimate and real.
You can buy music and it's a beautiful form of doing online retail.
We decided that's actually good for us because we're not something for
everybody, we're a niche market player and we want to give DJs the
content that they need to play in a format that's professional enough
for their needs.
RS: I notice that with the 3.0 update, it seems like you're
aiming almost more to the consumer market with all the personalization
features. Was that an active goal for the 3.0 updates?
Beatport: My Beatport was actually aimed more at the DJ than the consumer.
The DJs that we serve were really wanting that features because our
catalogue was getting so big, they didn't have any way to relate to
what other people were buying. So that's actually the first step
towards what we've been working on with a big master plan of how this
is all going to work - so it's pretty exciting.
RS: What's the percentage of DJs versus music lovers?
Beatport: Last year we did a survey and we were eighty-five percent
DJ and fifteen percent consumer or fans. Now, we're about sixty-five
percent DJ and thirty-five percent consumers. It isn't that we're
getting less DJs because we're actually getting a lot more DJs, but
the consumer crossover is happening because of all the events we're
sponsoring and promotions. We're not actively pursing consumers, but
they're getting interested in the Beatport brand.
RS: The Beatport partnership with DJ Magazine is probably
driving a lot of the consumer focus as well.
Beatport: Right. Those kinds of relationships really help with
getting us brand awareness in markets where we're not specifically
focusing.
RS: In the whole iPod/iTunes world whereabouts does Beatport
actually live?
Beatport: If you looked at all of the content that iTunes has versus
all of the content that Beatport has, I would say we overlap each
other maybe about ten percent. Beatport, in the world of online
retail, is a little leftfield for the traditional iTunes consumer. It
takes a lot more commitment to get through the purchasing environment
for us versus iTunes. But once you do, you realize how much more
powerful Beatport is than iTunes. You can shop by label, relate
people to other things - there's just tremendous things you can do on
Beatport that just don't exist on iTunes. Understandably, the
catalogue is just so much bigger on iTunes, it would be impossible to
shop that way. Our goal is to continue to bring tools and services
online that assist in that process of organizing the catalogue and
keeping that so those consumers that want to venture outside the
iTunes world can feel comfortable in our world.
