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| quote: | Originally posted by cherrybarry
oh my...didn't even notice till i got to page 3 wow |
look at this scrub, using ten posts per page
It's obvious to anyone who uses the internet in any capacity that legal, purchased MP3 downloading ala Beatport has changed the game completely. It's suddenly entirely easier to get music, and discovering new tracks is easier than ever. I came into dance music as digital downloads became the norm, so it's been interesting to watch the transition.
For reference, I got into trance music around 2003, having heard the cheesy radio-friendly dance music along the lines of DJ Encore, DJ Sammy, and Ian Van Dahl. Here in the United States, real EDM still had yet to take a firm hold outside of clubs (as is still the case), so even that pop-trance sound was completely different from anything I'd heard before. So I did what anyone else would do in that situation - download MP3s. Obviously this was long after the days of Napster, so I utilized eMule, Gnutella, and other popular file-sharing protocols.
Finding music was difficult at first. Basically my method was to find a recommendation somewhere (initially, this was often on DI.fm), download whatever I could find by that artist, and then download everything by the people who remixed that artist's songs. This helped me amass a pretty decent collection of most of the big names - ATB, Chicane, Binary Finary, Ferry Corsten, Tiësto, Rank 1, and so on.
iTunes, and the Music Store to go with it, came out on Windows in October 2003, and suddenly the game changed completely. But iTunes initially didn't have much of a back catalog of electronic music, and aside from stuff on labels like Ultra, I still obtained most of my trance through P2P. It took a few years for iTunes to amass a large number of EDM labels, as most were probably skittish about the unproved sales format that digital download offered.
Beatport, then, was instrumental in helping digital download reach mainstream popularity. The truly revolutionary aspect of Beatport was the way it offered full-quality, non-DRM digital downloads and long, moderate-quality previews - something that nobody had dared do before. You could get moderately compressed, FairPlay-encoded AAC files off iTunes, but good luck using that with any digital DJ software. The proliferation of legal digital download sites like Beatport, combined with hybrid digital DJ solutions like FinalScratch, Ableton and Serato, made it so that DJs and not just EDM fans were getting their music straight from the internet. This had the secondary effect of driving down CD prices.
That said, we're far from a perfect music solution. For one thing, Beatport's prices are still a bit high - $2.49 for one track seems a bit exorbitant in a world where we have grown to expect $0.99 downloads thanks to iTunes. I also worry about the death of electronic music on vinyl - call me a hopeless romantic, but I think vinyl has a quality and texture that nothing else can match. Another factor that remains to be unseen is just how popular electronic music will get - like I said, here in the United States it's mostly on the fringes, but in Europe trance has vaulted firmly into the mainstream. It's an exciting time, and it will be interesting to see what happens next.
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