Beaport: Creating Engaging Content for Dance Music Fans

  • published on7, Oct, 2012
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For Social Media Week, I attended the “Think Small Go Big: The Importance of Engaging a Community” seminar hosted by Beatport’s CEO Matthew Adell. As a fan of dance music and a recent frequenter of Beatport, I wanted to find out more about how they provide content to a community of dance music fans and how their service sets them apart from their competitors.

Adell started the presentation by listing facts about the company, and I have to say they were very interesting. Beatport had sold over 90 million downloads since its inception in 2004, has generated more than $100 million dollars in payouts, and is the #1 non artist brand. Quite impressive from a retailer that only sells one style of music.

Following these fun facts, I found Adell’s discussion about why it’s important for companies to engage their communities and more specifically how Beatport engages theirs. The four main points he discussed on how companies should engage communities were context and convenience, identifying your constituents, find them where they are, and adding context around them.

Unlike iTunes, Beatport is not a retailer that uses a convenience based model. What is meant by this is that, iTunes is available on several devices and gives users a wide variety of content such as music, TV shows, apps, and movies. To Adell, this site has no context as it caters to everyone rather than a specific constituency. He also noted iTunes categories all electronic dance music under one category, whereas Beatport has 20 categories.

For Beatport, it’s constituents are DJ’s so what they need is different from the average music consumer. Beatport provides high quality audio files, DRM free mp3’s, a rapid refresh rate for new music, and the ability to share content with their fans and friends. All of these features are important, as DJ’s need highly quality music files and the latest tunes to play to their fans.

For user engagement, Beatport has many hubs on the web including Twitter, Facebook and Youtube in order to reach out and create an active community. Adell mentioned that it is important to be authentic with the content being generated, respect the medium (dance music) and to keep the language and culture in mind when communicating with the fans.

Additionally, he mentioned several features Beatport offers for the dance community and how the various platforms can cater to different users. For instance, he discussed how the site’s remix contests generates a large number of entry’s from both professionals and amateur’s, with the winning remix getting an exclusive release of Beatport.

The site also boasts the largest number of DJ profiles with 88,000, and fans can see where they are playing, purchase their tracks and see what songs they have put into mixes.

All of this creates a context where DJ’s and fans of dance music can interact with each other all while develop a community where the genre is appreciated and respected. It was truly interesting to see how a site can create a foster a large online community of people with a common interest.

 

 

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