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BEATPORT FOUNDER PENS LETTER ON HOW TO SAVE THE COMPANY, RETAILER ISSUES STATEMENT

Beatport says it will now focus on DJs as its core customer...

There’s been a lot going on at Beatport HQ over the last few months, as troubled parent company SFX Entertainment announced that it was to auction off the digital music retail platform to pay off its own debts in January, before suspending that auction and closing a number of services including Beatport News, its mobile app, streaming service and the Events section of the site earlier this month (May).

Now, former CEO and founding partner of Beatport, Jonas Tempel, has written an open letter, detailing how he feels the business can be saved. In it, he said, “To the Beatport team, if you are interested, I’d like to humbly offer three big picture strategic suggestions, followed by a short list of experiential enhancements that could significantly improve the platform in the near-term.”

The three solutions include refocusing the business model to concentrate on the core of Beatport as a B2B brand selling premium content, fixing the brand so it “feels less like a store that just wants to sell more downloads”, and fixing the experience as “all of its extensions are boring and lack any hint towards innovation.”

The letter came at the same time that Beatport’s senior vice president of marketing and analytics, Terry Weerasinghe, made a statement to Resident Advisor ahead of the company’s impending sale, confirming that the retailer would refocus on its core customer base.

He said, “We're now able to dedicate all our resources to the store, which is what we are known and loved for. This means we're also able to focus on one customer – DJs – who are the foundation of what Beatport is and always has been. We'd rather do one thing better than anybody else than offer another me-too service.”

You can read Tempel’s full letter at Nest HQ.

(Photo via FlickR user Maddy Cozins)

Rob McCallum is DJ Mag’s digital news writer. Follow him on Twitter here.