Beatport A modern creator tools ecosystem

Beatport was founded in 2004 as an online music marketplace geared towards DJs. This remains its core business, but in the time since (and particularly the past several years), it has expanded to offer more. Beatport now owns Loopmasters, including both sound packs platform Loopcloud, and music plug-in marketplace Plugin Boutique, as well as distribution and royalty management platform Ampsuite, and LabelRadar, a service that connects artists and labels. Beatport also offers a web-based DJing application, an artist incubator program, and a streaming service. Several of these offerings, including Loopcloud and the Beatport streaming service, are subscription based, following a wider trend in the creator tools marketplace. Additionally, sounds and sample culture are now embedded in the mainstream, and sounds is the second-fastest-growing sector of the music creation software, sounds, and services market, on track to grow by 154% to reach $4 billion by 2030.

A whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and perhaps most importantly, all these divisions combine to form an end-to-end ecosystem that supports DJs and artists from music creation to release, distribution, and beyond. This empowers the new generation of creators who seek to go from 0 to 100 faster than ever, with a one-stop-shop for their needs. It is conceivable that a creator might find samples and plug-ins using Loopcloud and Plugin Boutique, distribute their music and manage their businesses through Ampsuite, use Beatport DJ to DJ from their web browser, and upload their music to LabelRadar in hopes of signing a record deal. In fact, Beatport’s acquisition of LabelRadar also positions it as a two-sided marketplace for the electronic music industry. However, the risk for Beatport is that the segment of artists who post directly online is growing twice as fast as the segment of creators following the traditional funnel of self-releasing on streaming via a distributor. As the definition of a music creator becomes more fluid, the end-to-end process that Beatport’s ecosystem seeks to serve may change shape as well.