The dominant online music store for DJ-format dance music releases — high-quality WAV/AIFF downloads with extensive metadata.
Definition
Beatport is an online music store launched in 2004 specifically targeted at professional DJs. Unlike consumer services like iTunes or Spotify, Beatport sells lossless WAV and AIFF downloads with comprehensive metadata — BPM, key, label, release date, and genre tag — along with extended-mix versions and DJ-friendly intros/outros. The store has separate top-100 charts for each subgenre (Trance, Progressive Trance, Psytrance, etc.) which function as influential scene barometers; producers and labels track their Beatport rankings closely, and a #1 chart position on a major subgenre is a significant career milestone. Beatport also hosts Beatport Streaming for DJs, the Beatport DJ web tool, and operates Beatsource for open-format DJs. It remains the central commercial infrastructure of the dance-music economy.