What is Beatport and how does it work?

The company has been around since 2004 when it was founded and, since then, the mission has remained the same: to serve the unique needs of their community with world-class products and services that inspire and connect the landscape of creators, DJs, and fans. Through this commitment, Beatport’s goal is to constantly drive innovation and inspiration, helping to lead and define the progression of dance music culture.

Today, Beatport remains the recognized industry leader for the DJ community with a global footprint of over 36M unique users, 465K DJ customers, 11M curated tracks supplied from 75K label partnerships.

Up until now Beatport’s charts, banners and new release sections have been dominated by the upper echelon of talent. This made it very difficult to dig a little deeper. Beatport Hype provides you with the ultimate discovery platform for new and innovative music. As a label, you can pay a monthly fee and compete amongst the HYPE labels pool, labels that don’t make higher than a certain threshold of revenue, given that they are relatively new and whose content has not been discovered yet. In that way it is easier for you as a Label to have your music charting in the HYPE top 10, since you are no longer competing with the “whales” of the genre. Hype is eligible for the top10 selling genres.

Beatport LINK is a streaming service for DJs that makes Beatport’s extensive electronic music catalog available to stream audio (AAC 128kbps and 256 kbps quality) into LINK subscription enabled devices. Subscribers can also play tracks from their existing collection and purchase any tracks they want to keep for offline use. In addition, they can use the features provided by their software and hardware setups. The full Beatport CLOUD service is included with a Beatport LINK subscription, and includes unlimited downloads and the Needle Drop Player.

Find more info on Beatport's FAQs.

Beatport holds the largest repertoire of downloadable dance music and is considered the go-to marketplace for DJs to purchase tracks for their sets. For 15 years, Beatport has been the preferred supplier for independent artists and labels: why? The store provides multiple diverse ways for artists to obtain higher quality music files, where user and license rights with publishers/labels are not limited to personal consumption, but to music creation and exchange.

By expanding their digital offerings with Beatport LINK and Beatport Hype, the store offers a stream rate that tends to be higher than regular streaming services, along with decentralizing the electronic scene when it comes to underground music - not only by the hands of a truly dedicated editorial team for each genre, but also by having labels and producers as their core business: 96% of Beatport’s revenue is paid to independent labels. Since it was launched, it has paid out $300 million to indie dance music labels.

Beatport is important for electronic musicians because it pushes the scene forward, both by scale (the company sold music for 74,000 independent labels in 2020 and had 8,000 labels join the platform in 2019) and by programs: during Covid-19 pandemic, the platform held several livestreams and had a 20% increase in releases.

In order to get your music on Beatport, you will need to work with a music distributor and have a label registered in the store. iMusician is one of the only digital music distributors that gets your music on Beatport without an extra fee, all you have to do is create an account with iMusician, and follow the instructions below to register your label.

Find out each step of the process on how to get your music on Beatport.

Registering a label is required in order to get your music on Beatport. With iMusician, you can do so in less than 5 minutes by sending us an email and filling out a form. Once you submit your request for your electronic label, iMusician’s team will review your data and notify you via email if everything is correct. Once approved, your request will be sent to Beatport and your label will be live in up to 4 weeks.

In case you don’t have a label or the time to create one, you can always use iMusician’s free label iM Electronica when choosing the label in the release process.

The artist name on Beatport: Careful of homonyms!

It is common that an artist name sometimes already exists on Beatport, so what can an artist do to separate from the existing artist name that is the same with theirs?

For example, a person starts releasing music and they choose an artist name, say, “Steve Mill”. However, there might be another “Steve Mill” releasing music already. If that new “Steve Mill” distributes their music to Beatport, it will obviously land under the existing “Steve Mill” profile already. What can the new artist “Steve Mill” do to separate? We recommend adding a country abbreviation. For example, if the new artist is from the UK, we recommend to distribute their content under the name “Steve Mill (UK)” in order for our system to create a new artist entity and separate the creative work that way.

The Label decides about the genre and chooses from the menu of genres available to them by their distributor. Note, not all distributors are able to deliver content to all available genres on the store (34 genres).

As mentioned above, the most popular genres at Beatport are:

• Techno (Peak Time / Driving)
• Tech House
• House
• Melodic House & Techno
• Drum & Bass
• Deep House
• Progressive House
• Minimal / Deep Tech
• Trance
• Dance / Electro Pop

There are Beatport only curated genres, that means no distributor can deliver content to those genres, it’s up to Beatport’s curation team to tag the content for those genres. That happens in order to ensure the right music falls under those genres and to avoid wrong-tagging. Some examples are Bass / Club etc.

In order for a label to register for their music to be on Beatport, they need to speak to their distributor (like iMusician), fill in an online form with information about their label, their past and future releases and submit it. It takes up to 4 weeks for the label to be approved. Unless the label’s music is completely irrelevant for the store, Beatport approves the majority of the labels.

Catalog Number is essential for a release. Not only for the label to be able to keep organisation of their releases as the years pass and the catalog becomes bigger, but for Beatport’s team as well to be able to track the releases in the system easier.