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Business News Deals Digital
SFX’s Beatport gets into bed with competitor Spotify
By Chris Cooke | Published on Thursday 23 July 2015
EDM huckster SFX yesterday announced an alliance between its Beatport platform and Spotify which will see unique audio and video content secured and created by the former pumped out through the latter’s streaming service.
Which is interesting mainly because Beatport, originally a download store of course, moved into streaming music itself earlier this year, making the two firms competitors who really should be busy briefing against each other on the sly. And then wishing for the other’s imminent demise and a whisking off to that place in the digital sky where Peoplesound and Wippet and Puremix and MyCokeMusic and Sony Connect and Imeem and Lala and Bloom and Sony Music Unlimited hang out.
But no, it’s a positive love-in. Beatport is “thrilled” obviously, to be “providing our unique content around all things EMC to the Spotify audience”, said Greg Consiglio in his highly anticipated first quote in the job of CEO of Beatport. EMC, in case you’ve forgotten, is “electronic music cultcha”. Spotify users, he added, will “be the first to access the latest need-to-know exclusive electronic music from Beatport and will also be able to watch to a mix of original festival and event video content”.
That video content will come from SFX’s portfolio of dance music festivals, while the exclusive music will be tracks previously only available on Beatport. The team behind the SFX online platform will also curate playlists for Spotify users who are bored with the indie durge the streaming service’s own new Discover Weekly service has recommended and who fancy something with a few more bleeps instead.
The deal, and the promise of other similar alliances, suggests that SFX increasingly sees Beatport as a media brand through which to promote its festivals and brand partnerships, rather than just another streaming service, which is probably a sound plan. For Spotify the deal fits into that recent strategy to secure more exclusive and video content, basically anything to distinguish its service from that other download store busy moving itself into the streaming space.
Says Spotify’s Chief Content Officer Ken Parks: “Millions of Spotify users are going to love this unique music and video content that only Beatport can bring. Two billion times every month, our listeners discover an artist they’ve never heard of through a Spotify playlist. I’m really pleased that we can include Beatport’s new music exclusives to our deep catalogue of both rising and established artists”.
