Much to the shagrin of record stores around the world, the digital revolution has nearly completely taken over the dance music industry. The culprit? Online stores like Beatport. Of course, it’s not all their fault: the advent of DJs distributing promo CDRs probably played a major part as well. Even so, Beatport has certainly revived my excitement about new dance music.
As a bedroom DJ who once crawled through record bins looking for the latest, greatest tracks, Beatport has completely changed my world. For one, I’d never find the latest tracks in the stores. I reverted to ordering from brick-and-mortar stores in New York or even Toronto in trying to get a track that was newer than 6 months old.
Beatport provides a Flash interface, which at first might seem annoying, but later proves to be pretty cool as you flip through tons of music while your currently playing preview track plays along in the background. Without using an ugly frame-based HTML site, this would be pretty difficult.
Every week, their store seems to get more and more labels on-board and the track selection is far superior to any brick-and-mortar, or even online, store I ever frequented. Now obviously you can’t “spin” an MP3 directly, but by burning the downloaded tracks onto a CD for your CDJ-1000 or simply downloading and spinning them with Stanton’s Final Scratch, you can freshen up your record box in no time, anytime. I’m a fan and even if you don’t buy anything, it’s fun to just flip through and listen to their generous song samples while killing time at work.
#1 by crescentfresh on October 12th, 2007
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Final scratch is cool and all, but what about the artistry of actually working with real vinyl and turntables? The joy of finding a gem among the 1000’s of records in a store can’t be replaced by anything on the internet…