![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Nobody paved the way." The tiny staff worked long hours and weekends in an office so small that they had to stack servers on their own desks. "I was the first employee at Beatport! We were building before iTunes launched. "I was there right at the beginning, prior to launch," he says. Over the phone from his home in Denver, former staffer Lloyd Starr-who joined Beatport as a software developer in 2003, and later ascended the ranks to become Chief Operating Officer, and then President of Beatport Pro, a vertical specializing in music library management software for DJs-paints the early days of the company as the stuff of startup utopia. To understand what the story Beatport means-both for the company and for dance music culture as a whole-we have to go back to a time before massive drops and millions of dollars, to the town of Denver, Colorado. The bankruptcy culminated in Beatport laying off nearly 50 employees-approximately half of its staff-and shuttering all of its departments that do not involve the direct sales of music. SFX filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy earlier this year, with Billboard reporting that its stock had plummeted to just over one cent a share. Alleged corporate mismanagement from the new owners, a fast-changing technological climate, and a conveyor belt of new products that drew focus away from Beatport's founding mission led to the spectacular and very public crumbling of one of dance music's pillars. When Robert Sillerman's dance media conglomerate SFX Entertainment bought the company in 2013- for $58.6 million-Beatport was the hottest startup in all of electronic music.Īlmost immediately after acquisition by SFX-a live events company boasting an expansive portfolio of festivals and promoters, including Tomorrowland, Electric Zoo, and Mysteryland-Beatport's fortunes changed. As the company's inventory grew, its charts-Beatport's top sales rankings, broken down by genre-became an industry standard for measuring a DJ or producer's success. Over the next decade, the platform would mature into a catalyst for the worldwide explosion of dance music-and particularly, that of the EDM movement, where massive crowds, venture capitalists, and superstar DJs turned club sounds into big business. Beatport launched in January 2004 with 79 labels, mainly house music-focused, in its catalogue. ![]()
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