Eric Wahlforss is one of the guys behind SoundCloud. This is where he jots down thoughts on the web, music and strategy, among other things.
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Beatport 2.0 Comments
Beatport is a fairly new online music store for dance/electronica, created by my favorite music software company.
The problem is that Beatport — in it’s current state — sucks pretty badly. Since I’m such a fan of their music production software, and since they actually sponsor me with products, I thought I should give them some honest feedback from a consumer/web developer point of view. And to really make them hurry up with implementing my proposed changes, I publish the mail I wrote to them here:
“Hi,
I greatly appreciate the beatport initiative. There is a huge demand for good online stores for electronic music and dance music.Beatport got even better with the recent 2.0 release, but I still feel it didn’t address some of its most important inherent problems. I’m probably quite an optimal customer — I love electronic music and mp3s, and I’ve got a credit card loaded with money to spend on good music! Even so, I got fairly frustrated when trying to use your store the other day. So I though I’d better give you some comments and advice, from a developer’s and customer’s point of view.
1) I quickly discovered a track on beatport that I wanted to point a friend to. Too bad it turns out there is no way of doing so! There seem to be no permanent, unique links attached to each track/release/artist/label! That effectively shuts out the whole community of people who put up their thoughts online and who pass valuable links to each other (bloggers 20m+, special interest groups etc) which in turn has a sizable impact on your sales! Recent research shows that this community is indeed very important for online stores, and to neglect its existence is arguably a very stupid business decision.
Don’t believe me? Read this.
Talking about links, I believe they should be pretty. That is: beatport.com/artist/photek/release/1 or beatport.com/label/basic_channel/ is much better than beatport.com/track_id.cgi? id=23967764234&viewmode=artist&a=photek
Also bidirectional links (a.k.a. trackbacks) are nice (and the main reason why blogs work). Let users trackback, rate and comment on the beatport releases and your sales would increase, maybe double.
2) After I signed up on beatport, I started getting annoying news mails with long ‘top lists’ of tracks that didn’t interest me. please provide a number of rss-feeds for relevant topics instead (new releases in each genre, new releases by a specific label etc). Think about building a recommendation system.
3) It doesn’t remember my username, and it doesn’t keep me logged in (by using a cookie).
4) Improve the search function. Not my intention to sound rude, but it is broken as it stands today.
4) Lastly, it is still my opinion that Flash sucks. It’s a good idea, but given the implementation and the current state of the web, it sucks. And I’m not saying this because I don’t know how Flash works nor because I never worked with it. On the contrary, I did a few projects with Flash and I’ve learned to appreciate it for some tasks, but *far* from all.
Needless to say, I was quite disappointed when I loaded up beatport 2.0 for the first time and realized that now *everything* is Flash. (it is still better than the godforsaken flash-multi-framesets it replaced though.)
But it still sucks, for the following reasons (among others):
- The GUI doesn’t fit on my screen (1024*768 12” powerbook), so I have to scroll up and down constantly.
- It doesn’t flex, and there is no way of using the keyboard for navigation. very frustrating, especially when browsing long lists of artists.
- It does away with the whole browser interface paradigm, in effect creating a new application within the application (that means re-learning the navigation, back buttons etc.)
- You lose the benefits of standard things that web browsers do for you (like remembering usernames, passwords on sites, there goes another part of your sales, due to users who forgot their passwords. You can’t search the page for info, something people who search for e.g. a track on the web often do — and you can’t bookmark things. Bookmark?!! Yes, bookmarks are coming back in a big way, I’m using del.icio.us myself. )
- search engines won’t index your catalog
- It’s slow and buggy on Firefox for Mac OS X (yes, even with the latest plugin) and it doesn’t work well on Linux.
Here I’d like to put in a good word for simple no-frames XHTML+CSS with a bunch of nifty javascripting on top. Nowadays all major browsers support background loading of data (used to be one of the major advantages of using Flash). Since you are only using pixelated graphics (the text is usually annoyingly small, and there is no way of changing that, again due to Flash), users would hardly notice the change in terms of visual experience. In fact there is hardly nothing you couldn’t do with HTML (provided you are using a nice server technology like j2ee or so) that you are doing with your Flash app now (yes, you could still use a little flash-applet for the track preview-thingie).
All in all, I think beatport is a great initiative — I surely hope I didn’t sound too negative! I really like your other products (already eagerly awaiting the new Kontakt 2.0 release, which seems brilliant).
So finally, I wish you good luck with the future development of beatport.com, and I really hope you take some of my views into account!”
March 29th, 2005 at 4:37 am
I didn’t notice that NI were beatport partners. I had seen beatport before and thought it looked quite similar to kontakt
Anyway, I agree with most of your comments. The interface is a pain to use. The thing that irks me the most is the font size though. Rather hard to read on my 19″ at 1280 x 1024.
March 29th, 2005 at 5:33 am
Most of beatport was developed in conjunction with this company http://www.factorylabs.com/ in Denver, it’s a great idea but the usability is really bad, I personally think it got allot worse with 2.0 I liked the first version better. It just seems so heavy and way to busy.
May 27th, 2005 at 2:00 am
Play it Tonight:
http://www.playittonight.com
another digital dance music download site seems to have all these problems answered.
June 10th, 2005 at 5:24 pm
PlayitTonight.com is pretty good, but doesn’t have nearly the selection of Beatport, however I totally agree that an all flash sight is obnoxious, however until there is an alternative with the same EXTENSIVE list of labels I’ll continue to get my tunes there… (But hopefully Beatport 3.0 will be better…)
June 19th, 2005 at 3:45 pm
The new beatport is pretty awful from a usability point of view these days. Trackitdown.net isn’t perfect, but at least it’s easy to get to URLs on their site and they’re improving things like the search engine all the time. Plus, they did at least bother to make their site work on all sized monitors.
July 12th, 2005 at 8:32 pm
I’ve got the latest flash plugin for linux installed, but nothing happens when I load the page. Grr, flash. ;/
July 12th, 2005 at 8:38 pm
Yup. they suck.
August 29th, 2005 at 11:54 pm
it sucks bigtime
I cannot even buy enything because I cannot set my card as the default card.
nothing works standard. flash: die!
October 9th, 2005 at 2:54 am
I have to say I agree with all your comments! I also would prefer an XHTML/CSS site.
However one other option for Beatport 3.0 might be AJAX for a better performing rich client interface.
October 9th, 2005 at 10:11 am
Yep, AJAX should definitely be part of the package.
November 14th, 2005 at 2:09 am
Thank you for your comments. I actually mentioned many of your suggestions (prior to reading this article) in my recent response to the BeatPort customer survey. I think you should make one small edition to the comments you provide; add priority rankings. That is, if BeatPort can fix the search interface, many of the suggestions can be tweaked and massaged in due course. However, as it stands the search functionality is broken, and ultimately pivotal to the overall user experience.
Following that, BeatPort needs to seriously consider bringing the conventions found in web browers into their GUI. Meaning, ppl have been using web broswers for year now, and, given that we are creatures of habit, we form intuitions to help off load mental duties. Since the BeatPort site is so *busy* AND it follows few - if any - conventions, a new user will have no idea how to solve problems. Experienced users will simply self-combust.
Cheers!
November 15th, 2005 at 2:39 am
Emilio: True, true. I did actually send them a link to this post in the customer survey. hope they “get it”, last time I sent them this, the reply I got wasn’t very encouraging. something like: good points, but we like Flash…
March 18th, 2007 at 9:19 pm
I just saw this now and while I agree with many of your points I find it strange that all the comments here are 100% in line with what you said. Are you sure you’re not filtering? Again. I’m a web designer who works for a company that pays a great deal of attention to usability, so I think you’ve made a lot of good points (albeit in an extremely confrontational way that would make most people not want to read past the 3rd sentence), but I’ve been using Beatport for a few years and have not really had much of a problem. Yes, it took me a little while to find the Back buttons and the search sometimes doesn’t work well on a Mac, but overall I’ve had no significant issues with Beatport.
June 22nd, 2007 at 11:00 am
Beatport doesnt accept new label applications. They are actually fueling the ancient major label commercial pop engine that roared throught the 80’s and 90’s, ripping off artist royalties along the way.
Artist must go through distributors/major labels to get their music onto Beatport… which in turn not only leaves the artist with only around 20% of the profit from sales, but more importantly, due to Beatports policies and label/dist. politics, leaves the consumer with a limited choice of new music.
Its just bad business.
Oh and requiring flash to view a website is just a joke.
June 24th, 2007 at 11:18 pm
omfg i completely agree. flash is complete nonsense. you nailed it. these guys ‘like flash’ because because it hurts their brains to think about proper css+html. the site is repulsive, slow, buggy, and unusable. i mean f off, its 2007, you load the page, the font hurts your eyes, you can’t search, the interaction model is completely backward and inconsistent with the 100 or so pages you’ve already viewed that day….
plus this closed (non-) standards crap is so misguided in general.. at a time when everything seems to be opening up everywhere else… where’s the developer api?? bah!
the other problems mentioned like no permanent links… sweet jebus… what can i possibly say…
why do they have a lock on the content? without some kind of special relationship with labels this kind of crap shouldn’t survive very long… and the market is ready for an effective competitor… it really surprises me that no-one has pulled this off yet
June 26th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
Agree with all of you, especially with baoboa. I think that they dont have the right to kick new labels. My best friend ( and label owner) is trying to get his label to beatport 1,5 year now. After many attempts they send him an email telling him that they don’t accept new labels. He told them that his label is not new and he is trying to get in contact with them for more than 1,5 year. Well, they really don’t care. They are not professionals and im sure that beatport owners don’t give a f*ck about their business as they cant control their employees. The worse is that most people think that beatport is the best. They dont know what is really happening and they don’t care actually.
and something more (for all stores), i cant understand something …
The online stores keeping 50%-60% of the sales! WHO THEY THINK THEY ARE? And they do nothing. So many labels out there … thousands, why they don’t make all together a open online store and they accept to give their music to the thiefs? Because THEY ARE thiefs. They should keep maximum a 10 - 15%. wtf? What the producer will get? what the remixer will get? what the label will get? how the webmaster will get paid? how the grafs designer will get paid? how the promoter will get paid? ALL of them they will take a 40%. And the online store the 60% ooh!!! sounds fair aaa?
Im really pissed off.
July 9th, 2007 at 8:17 pm
These guys suck. They are nothing but a bunch of amateur hacks trying to make money off talented musicians. They treat their employees like crap too. The best thing they could do for everyone involved is shut down their pitiful business and go home. Bonass Tempel is nothing but a big fat software pirate who does way to many illicit substances and deals crap to kids on the side.
July 25th, 2007 at 4:05 pm
Yall should check out http://www.gigacrate.com. It’s a great alternative to Beatport. Little flash. In fact, the only flash is the audio player itself.
They are a new dj friendly digital music site and community. Not quite the catalog that Beatport has, but certainly a good alternative.
Check it:
http://www.gigacrate.com