quote:

Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles It's true that the Internet provides great potential to search out more really obscure, diverse stuff, but it seems like most people make very little use of that, preferring to see the net as just a way of more quickly and easily obtaining stuff they already know and stuff their friends and peers are already listening to. In some ways dance music has been homogenizing: people across the world can now become aware of which producers, tracks, and DJs are "big" everywhere rather than mostly being buried in whatever is hot in their local scene, and this phenomenon perpetuates itself as DJs around the globe download whatever the big tracks of the month happen to be. And in other ways it's been diversifying: I would wager that most of us have a much more diverse, eclectic, and above all international roster of tracks in our possession than we would have had if there were no Internet music.

Well put.

quote:

Originally posted by RJT A. There's so much stuff out there these days. B. Beatport is the primary distribution point for DD's (sorry to keep using your phrase - couldn't think of a synonym ) C. Not everyone has the time or drive to sort through it all.

With regards to A, this is not a problem. The Internet is all about lots of content... and the most successful online retailers (i.e. Amazon) learn to drive traffic through smart interfaces, recommendation engines, community participation, "crowd-sourcing," and--of course--powerful search functionality. Beatport does a piss-poor job of all this. Their interface sucks, the recommendations are weak, there is no community, DJ charts provide a lukewarm form of crowd-sourcing, and their search results? A joke. It is lucky for them that there isn't much in the way of competition in the marketplace... and, of course, there is item B: Beatport has the lion's share of high profile distribution agreements... and any newcomer has a lot of catching up to do in that respect.

I think that if Amazon got heavily into releasing digital dance music singles they could crush Beatport.