Two Los Angeles-bred DJs, President Brian “Quickie” Wong and Chief Content Officer Edwin “Phenom” Paredes, partnered with Beatport, a DJ hub and long-established leader of the dance-music scene, to found the genre-agnostic Beatsource in 2019. Prior to that, the duo — who’ve worked together since 2005 at DJcity, a smaller networking platform that Wong runs — had been trying to secure the proper label deals for about a decade, Wong tells.
A quick history lesson: When hip-hop began to blossom in the late 1970s, DJs were equipped with vinyl records, turntables, and just a couple of breakbeats. CDs would then rise in popularity throughout the Eighties and Nineties, ushering in the idea of the mobile DJ. Pioneer DJ created the first CDJ player in 1994. By 1997, a University of Auckland student named Steve West, who’d go on to co-found audio software company Serato, was learning to play the bass guitar.
Before, he points out, the average DJ could only play what they could go out and physically buy. Paredes explains a DJ’s typical workflow back then: “You’d hear a song somewhere, you’d have to Shazam it or save it and then go to a store that had an MP3 opportunity — and now, most of them don’t. So, you’d buy it, download it, put it in a folder, jump it to your DJ software, upload it, tag it, and then play it. There were too many steps.
Back when radio was king, record-label-promotion departments would give DJs multiple copies of a record, and the copies would have things like a clean, a dirty, an instrumental, and an a cappella version. But in today’s world, superstars like Drake can tweak their songs up until the last minute, delivering the record hours before it’s due. That means the promo department doesn’t have time to send DJs their clean edits, for example, so DJs rush to do the work themselves.
Well done to the Beatsource team for persevering. Now if only all the DJs will use it.
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I'm happy to hear this and proud of these labels for stepping-up to ensure artists get their credit.
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