Most of the industry knows about the DJ Mag Top 100 DJs poll, but I guess I hadn’t thought of people gaming the system. I don’t mean to be a muckraker here, but I thought it was interesting that a number of people were caught "red handed" and that the marketing manager for DJ Dan and Christopher Lawrence was implicated. If you want the full details on this one, check out DJMag.com.
Eddie B
I read an article on ProgressiveHouse.com that says the future of DJ Mag is hanging “in the balance” after its publishers announced that they would “sell or close” the title. The article mentions the fact that DJ Mag and other dance music publications have been facing challenging market conditions.
Articles like this always give me a bit of heartburn. As I mentioned in a previous lengthy post, I am concerned about the fate of electronic music. Ultimately, I think the electronic music industry will prosper, but it’s troubling to read articles such as this.
What’s the significane of DJ Mag’s admitted difficulties? Is the electronic music industry undergoing a sort of slump? If so, is the slump limited in any ways – e.g. limited to print-based media or to certain geographic areas?
I feel like those of us who live and breathe electronic music shouldn’t take our magazines, clubs, or the genre’s general prosperity for granted. We don’t necessarily need to be evangelists, but it would certainly be great if we could channel our collective passion to help our industry flourish.
Eddie B
I’m going to step it up in this post by talking about some of our competitors, not perhaps what you’d think is good practice.
But this is worth it…
OK, so some people will know that Beatport have recently launched their v3.0 beta site. They’ve had a really rough time making one thing stick with their customers since the relaunch: regional pricing.
Their pricing is a three tier system and being a US based company all prices in the previous versions have been in USD. With the launch of 3.0 they forged a strategic alliance with DJ Mag to deliver a DJ Mag branded store front, powered by Beatport’s engine. This DJ Mag store beta was released a couple of weeks before Beatport 3.0 and offered the same pricing tier, but this time in GBP.
Then Beatport 3.0 is put in the water, so to speak, and amazingly now has GBP pricing for UK residents, Euro pricing for other EU countires and good ol’ USD for the rest of the world. All of a sudden the strength of the pound was wipped out for their UK customers, and effectively caused a massive (approx 80%) hike in price. Ouch. The UK just had the wool pulled over thier eyes overnight. Double Ouch. And while we’re at it so did the of Europe. Triple Ouch. Beatport, you’ve just been Tango’d!
What happens now? Well, if this chart is anything to go by it looks like DJ Download will grab the bulk of the UK business for now. I’m sure Juno will get a bunch and there are plenty of other sites out there too (you know, like us), so it looks like everyone might grab a bit of it.
Why did Beatport really make the price change then? Because I’m fairly sure there’s more to it than their statement:
“Beatport prices have been adjusted to reflect competitive industry pricing in two of our major territories, the United Kingdom and the European Union. Beatport has neither the highest nor the lowest priced downloads in these territories. We continue to offer the highest quality formats of our industry and we have invested a significant amount of our resources in creating a download store that makes finding the music you love as easy as possible.”
I think it has more to do with the strategic alliance struck up between DJ Mag and Beatport than anything. I mean, if you where DJ Mag, and spent a bunch of cash to license the Beatport backend – you wouldn’t want them to have a competitive advantage… like being half price!
At least that’s my opinion, right or wrong.
I don’t reallly know if Beatport’s traffic has really disappeared… but according to Alexa, it doesn’t look good right now.
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