It’s been an eventful year for dance music digital retailer Beatport ,following the bankruptcy filing of parent company SFX Entertainment and the subsequent shutdown of its streaming, news and events divisions. The site hinted later that some other big changes were on the horizon, and this week it revealed it will be overhauling its contentious genre classifications.
Resident Advisor reports that Beatport will be making changes to separate commercial EDM from more underground electronic music, and in the process responding to one of the longest-running criticisms directed at the digital music retailer.
“Beatport serves DJs from both of these worlds. But it's rare that a DJ wants to play both types of music. From now on, each genre will only address one of these worlds,” Beatport Senior Vice President Terry Weerasinghe told Resident Advisor.
The changes involve the addition of new genres like “big room” and “future house,” an introduction the site says will involve a hefty re-categorization of more than 500,000 different tracks already on sale at the service.
Meanwhile, the reorganization of labels like “progressive house” and “deep house” is intended to prevent commercial music from nudging underground records out of the charts, which means lesser-known labels might be more likely to feature prominently in the top 10.
“Labels like Suara, Drumcode, Soma and Ostgut Ton are all having fantastic years. But we’re hoping that this change also helps give exposure to more new and upcoming labels like Acido, Les Points and Whities,” Weerasinghe told Resident Advisor.
