Originally Posted by
mostapha
By digging for records better.
Beatport changed the world. For years, it was insanely easy to find all the music you wanted in one place. And for almost as long, if you were a producer and could get your music onto beatport, you could sell it for something like a profit or at least some exposure.
Years on, beatport (especially the charts) is a cesspool of homogeneous garbage caused by everyone emulating the tastemakers. DJs buy the same songs as headliners because they want to "be competitive". Producers use the same formulas because they worked for someone else. There's a part of me that wants to blame the near-zero barrier to entry for DJs and Producers alike, but I still believe that's overall a net positive for music as a whole...it's just harder and harder to get your music to stand out.
Beatport died when they started releasing a thousand new tracks a day. There was (and remains) absolutely no way to listen to it all; there's no way to dig for records that actually speak to you. There are no AI (more accurately, machine learning) based recommendation algorithms (and for philosophical and mathematical reasons, I don't think there ever will be good ones).
So, people defaulted to charts. That all suck.
It's no different from normal people buying the CDs that they hear on the radio so their car always sounds the same. A few people decide what's going to get played and a lot of people play it because actually shopping for music you like is extremely difficult.
Some of the best music I've bought (Dance or otherwise) was because the album art looked cool in a shop somewhere (back when those were a thing). Now, I basically do the same thing with Tidal.
As for shopping for music to DJ with...I'd like to see shops with a little more loose genre labels and a player based on randomness. Have it on in the background and add a song to your crate/cart if you like it. And if you miss something, well...too bad. You're going to miss things. You either miss damn near everything because you're following charts/trends or you miss stuff you might like because it just didn't come up. Pick your poison.
Bookmarks