Pioneer DJ's CDJ-3000 adds Beatport Streaming and with it, a new age of DJing arrives

Will it usher in a new egalitarian utopia or data-controlled, gate-kept nightmare?

Jun 29, 2023

Welcome to Future Filter

This is my new newsletter and you’re one of the first people to read it so thank you. I wanted to kick things off by reporting on a story that’s been close to my heart for a long time. For the many reasons outlined below, what may seem gimmicky and niche could actually have a profound impact on electronic music’s future in ways I feel we all need to be aware of. Streaming transformed the music industry and artists’ interests weren’t always considered. To avoid those same mistakes again, we need to open the dialogue now, before fundamental decisions are made.

After that, I’ve listed some recommended reading on the topic, and some articles and podcasts that I’ve been enjoying over the past weeks.

These newsletters will be sent weekly, some shorter, some longer, some Q&As, some deep dives and some roundtables – I’ll let you dictate what you’d prefer to read as I experiment with Substack and Future Filter in general. Everything will be free for the foreseeable, but I’ve left open the option to subscribe in case you want to support my writing. And if you do, thank you!

Thanks for reading and please do leave comments and get in touch – I’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback and suggestions for future topics.

Declan x

The Week in AI

Splice launch their new AI-powered Create feature, which matches sounds from their entire library with existing ideas and loops. It’s actually very cool.
Arpeggi Labs launches Kits.ai – a new store for licensed voice models. Excited to see this pan out.
RIAA says the popular Discord server ‘AI Hub’ – where many voice models were being shared – “undermines the whole music ecosystem” and asks the company to shut it down.
Sonophase launches Speak / Music – a new way to explore Apple Music’s catalogue using natural language. This feels very much like the future of search.
Water & Music speaks to Bronze.ai’s Lex Dromgoole about Building a New AI Music Format in this excellent interview. Lex is a super fascinating guy.

A new era for DJing?

It’s been a long time coming. I first started reporting on cloud DJing in 2018, just after Beatport had acquired the DJ storage platform Pulselocker, hinting at what felt inevitable. The idea of cloud DJing – streaming music files directly from the cloud to your DJ device of choice – has felt like the obvious next step for a long time. Now, later than expected, Beatport and Pioneer DJ have announced a new firmware update for the CDJ-3000 that brings Beatport Streaming to the industry-standard player.

This isn’t the first time streaming to hardware has been possible – Beatport Streaming (then LINK) came to DENON DJ Engine OS in 2020, while Pioneer DJ introduced their own cloud storage solution – CloudDirectPlay – in 2022. But Beatport streaming tech is by far the most mature, having had four years inside major software – including rekordbox DJ – to iron out the tech, fix bugs and respond to user feedback.

Despite that, for me, until it came to the CDJ it was always going to be seen as a novelty, an entry-level tool for bedroom DJs. To be fair, that’s also how it’s been marketed – the tech wasn’t (maybe isn’t?) ready for main room headliners across the world, for obvious reasons of stability and quality and instead was aimed at those who maybe grew up without a multi-GB MP3 library. The idea of a huge artist at a big festival having a technical nightmare under the LINK banner would have been a PR disaster – it had to be done properly, which probably explains the delays.

Like it or not (and DENON DJ definitely DO NOT) the CDJ is the industry standard player and graces pretty much every commercial DJ booth on the planet. The addition of Beatport Streaming takes it from bedroom to main room and with it, takes the arguments made in articles I’ve written for both DJ Mag and Resident Advisor out of the conceptual arena and into the real world. Now that it’s official, let’s revisit some of those points.

Side Note: I just want to make clear this is NOT an advert for Beatport, Pioneer DJ or any other company. I’ve been following this story for many years so am excited about its potential and concerned for its consequences, so wanted to lay out what might be coming next. I’m also aware Beatport aren’t the only company in the DJ streaming game, but given both their and Pioneer DJ’s legacy in electronic music, it feels pertinent now that this partnership is official. Full disclosure, I did have a call with Beatport ahead of this Substack going out, to clarify some technical questions in advance of the full press release being sent. Anything they’ve told me has been quoted or clarified below.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

It’s probably worth explaining how Beatport Streaming actually works on the CDJ. A CDJ-3000 with firmware 3.0 (it doesn’t work on any other CDJ model right now) will have Beatport as a source option once a USB drive or SD card is inserted. Click on it, log in using the touchscreen QWERTY keyboard and that’s it – your Beatport playlists the Beatport catalogue is available on the screen. I would have preferred something like a QR code login, similar to WhatsApp – logging in on a CDJ screen in the middle of a set, or when someone else is trying to play their last track, sounds clunky and annoying. If you’re logged in on one device you can Link it via ProDJLink to another CDJ – you don’t have to log in twice.

Once you load a track, it caches to an encrypted folder on your USB stick, so the next time you load that track, it doesn’t have to re-download. You can’t access this folder if you’re not logged in to Beatport Streaming so you can’t just walk off and use it on another CDJ that’s offline.

Any cue points or loop points, or any changes to the file, will be sync’d back to the cloud so next time you play that track from Beatport Streaming, they’ll be there. You can also sync rekordbox and Streaming if you have a rekordbox subscription for an extra cost – more on that below. Beatsource Tech did an in-depth video of how the service works here.

The file format and codec used is either 128kbps AAC or 256kbps AAC, depending on your Beatport subscription tier. 256 is roughly the equivalent of a 320 MP3. Beatport says lossless is a high priority on the roadmap.

Interestingly, there’s no DRM here. When you used a streaming service inside software like Traktor, rekordbox DJ etc, the record button was always greyed out so you can’t just record tracks and store them offline (home taping is killing music, after all). Here, you can record your mixer’s master as you normally would. I guess there’s not much that can be done to prevent that from happening anyway, even on software, but I thought Beatport may have just placated rightsholders and added something, even if it was performative.

Worth noting also, you can have multiple Beatport Streaming accounts on two different CDJs and if they’re linked you can play from another person’s account as if it was another USB.

WHY BEATPORT?

You might be wondering: ‘Why does it matter that Beatport is doing this? Can’t I just stream my own library?’ And the answer is: Yes! You can. Pioneer DJ already provide that service and it’s called CloudDirectPlay. Most touring DJs would probably prefer this, having collected endless promos, edits and unreleased tunes over the years that aren’t available on Beatport. Pioneer DJ’s offering though, is a service. You store your music in the cloud and sync metadata back and forth. What Beatport appear to be a building is a whole new product. Their dominance as the DJ download store of choice for nearly two decades has put them in a unique position to offer more than just file storage and syncing, in a number of ways:

Releases already include metadata around bpm and key.
Beatport already has a history of artist and DJ charts, as well as their own Top 100 and various genre lists. While the Top 100 definitely has lost its influence from the peak era, it’s still a valued aspect of a release cycle for most dance music labels and having it accessible inside DJ equipment (and software) could act as a new form of discoverability for newer DJs who are still experimenting with their setup and taste.
Those artist charts, and existing artist relations, mean that Beatport also can utilise their connections to create Streaming-only playlists curated by the DJs themselves, such as offering a playlist of a set at a festival immediately after it happened, for fans to practice with.
Beatport own Loopmasters. Right now, there’s no indication that this might happen, but it’s not a stretch to imagine a time when it’s not just Beatport’s catalogue that’s available to stream, but Loopmasters’ too, offering rolling loops, acapella, samples and one-shots to add to your set. Maybe you’ll stick to playing from USB one deck one and two but for the third deck that isn’t being used, load up some loops from the cloud for extra percussion. Doesn’t seem like that reality is too far away.

Sidenote: Beatport isn’t the only company offering streaming. TIDAL has stepped up their ‘for DJs’ arm of the company, and is already available inside DENON DJ kit and Serato, though no sign of them coming to CDJs anytime soon. SoundCloud and Deezer also offer streaming in DJ software and selected hardware.

HERE COMES THE DATA

But the really interesting part isn’t even about the technology itself, but its implications. Consumer streaming platforms became powerful not because they host millions of tracks, but because of data. Their algorithms are the product, not the music.

What you pay for is access to your own taste presented back to you at scale. A combination of a decade of listening and advanced, opaque algorithms means that Spotify knows us intimately and is designed to keep us on the platform for as long as possible and keep us coming back. And the more time we spend, the more the algorithm learns, the more we feel attached to that platform. There are, of course, extensive downsides to this form of music consumption – an algorithmic echo chamber and a lack of real connection with the artist or songs playing automatically just two examples – but that is the reality of the music listening landscape as it stands. As NYTimes put it: Streaming saved music. Artists hate it.

No one’s suggesting DJs are going to take recommendations from an algorithm in real-time, right there on the CDJ, but there are some parallels to how the data generated by cloud DJing could change the electronic music industry, the same way it did the consumer music fan experience. I’ve written about this exact topic, twice, once for DJ Mag and once for Resident Advisor, so I won’t get into it again here, but it’s definitely worth diving into those articles and absorbing some of the potential outcomes, good and bad.

THE ROYALTY QUESTION

It wouldn’t be hyperbole to say that royalty rates have dominated the discourse of the streaming age, and rightly so. Fractions of a penny per play have left individual artists and independent labels fighting over scraps when majors who own catalogues at scale can still benefit from the numbers game that is modern music listening. It’s created an even more top-heavy industry that’s decimated artist revenue across the board.

The big question then is how will a new form of streaming address these disparities, especially one that focuses on a pro-market, and also one that undermines download sales (more on that later, too). The good news is – at least on the surface – that Beatport’s royalty rate is actually pretty high, around $0.10 per play (Billboard has more info here.) So roughly 13 plays is equal to a sale on Beatport, if you owned 100% of your rights. It’s always a touchy and complex subject to put a price on a single play on any platform and quantify how that differs from environment to environment but suffice to say Beatport see a play as a play, in a bedroom, in a club or on a mainstage. How much that 10c per play feels like a good deal will depend on how much revenue from downloads is impacted by the shift to streaming in general.

There’s another aspect at play here, and that’s performance royalties. I wrote a piece back in 2019 explaining how producers are losing millions of pounds a year in royalties as unreported sets at events, bad metadata and a lack of will and investment from (some) global Performance Rights Organisations (PROs) are costing the electronic music community dearly. Basically, every time your song gets played at an event, it’s due a royalty, which could be as high as £75 if it’s played on the mainstage at Glasto, as a basic example.

That’s not an insignificant amount of money if you add up all the festivals throughout the summer but the complexity of the problem means we’re still far away from solving it. I won’t go into the details here as it’s a whole other newsletter, but most are laid out in the piece above.

Since then some significant advances have been made – Pioneer DJ acquired a 25% stake in DJMonitor, a music recognition and reporting company – which means we might eventually see PRO reporting directly from the CDJ (the dream). Also, producer and DJ DVS1 launched Aslice, which allows DJs to voluntarily split a portion of their fee with the producers who made the music they played in that set. It’s a noble and sadly necessary movement, and I am a huge fan of what they’re building.

Cloud DJing has the opportunity to solve this problem at the source. An always-on CDJ will mean what’s being played, and where, can be known in real-time, either using metadata from the ID3 tags, Shazam style recognition software/hardware or both. Let’s hope Beatport are working with global PROs to provide this data and this revenue gap can be narrowed or even shut entirely.

It’s worth saying, closing that data gap isn’t a substitute for royalties or download revenue, it should be happening on top of any income from sales and streams.

SUBSCRIPTION FATIGUE

It wouldn’t be 2023 without another subscription to consider – this time, to take advantage of all the features of both Pioneer DJ’s cloud syncing and Beatport Streaming’s platform, you’ll need two separate subscriptions, costing up to £66 a month. Not cheap, especially as you’ll have to continue to download music while CDJs around the world phase into the new firmware.

Subscriptions for consumers nearly always represented better value – millions of tracks at your fingertips for a tenner, nice one – but for pros, they’re fraught with problems. The best example is the plugin market, which has pivoted to subs in recent years, with a very mixed response. The fundamental issue is, as professionals, we’d rather own our tools – spending £20 a month for access to more plugins than you could buy for £3,000 seems like a great deal on the surface, but once you start using these products in your workflow, you can never cancel. You’re stuck. Once you end your sub, you lose access to the tools inside your own projects. You never own the products, despite potentially spending hundreds of pounds over a number of years on the subscription. You walk away with nothing.

For DJs, there’s another problem. What happens when, as we’ve seen with visual media platforms, Beatport’s best-performing labels realise they could do this for themselves and cut out the middleman? Defected, for example, could remove their catalogue from Beatport Streaming and set up Defected+, with access to their legacy catalogue, as well as Strictly Rhythm, Classic Records Co, Glitterbox etc. DJs locked into streaming then have to purchase another subscription, until Nervous do the same, and then another imprint. DJs have no control over those licensing deals and how they might change as the streaming landscape evolves, and what it might cost them to temporarily rent this music over time.

US DJ Chrissy touched on this in my piece for RA last year: "As soon as Netflix had a monopoly on at-home film viewing, they decided it was too expensive to keep all the classics and weird art films … If streaming conquers club culture and most DJs no longer own their libraries, what happens if streaming services decide Prince's catalogue is too expensive to keep online? You will never hear Prince in a club, restaurant, or wedding again."

A fair point.

THE END OF THE DOWNLOAD?

Rising subscription costs and volatile catalogue are just the beginning of the potential can of worms DJ streaming will open up for the electronic music industry. The next most obvious is the cannibalisation of download sales. How much DJ-specific download sales mean to independent electronic music labels is hard to quantify, especially as most touring DJs receive a relentless feed of promos. Funnily enough, it’s Beatport who most recently championed download sales on their site, claiming to have sold 25,519,770 downloads in 2022 alone – an increase of 35% and making up 12% of ALL music downloads worldwide. It’s a pretty remarkable stat, even more so when you consider the launch of Streaming is in direct competition with that growth. However, Beatport also says streaming has grown 60% in the past year (specific numbers aren’t revealed), largely through their web-based BeatportDJ app and Beatport Streaming inside rekordbox DJ, Traktor, Algoriddim djay etc.

So, it seems it’s a case of Beatport seeing what’s coming and creating their own narrative instead of waiting for someone else to beat them to it, but 25 million download sales feel like a significant chunk of revenue that could disappear for labels and artists. It’s worth saying, rightsholders can withhold their catalogues from Streaming if they want.

There’s also the argument that streaming is a discovery tool and that while DJs will use Streaming at home to find new music, and even try out mixes in software or hardware, they might then buy their playlists and stick it on USB as let’s be honest, it’ll take years (a decade?) for CDJs globally to update their firmware.

It’s hard to quantify the discovery point with numbers as it hasn’t happened yet, and I guess I see the argument, but it could also just end up handing Beatport more power as they can dictate the recommendation algorithms during the ‘crate-digging’ process. As it stands the playlists that appear inside the CDJ will mirror those available on the Beatport website, though this could change in the future if Beatport begins to learn your taste over time and suggest tracks, artists and playlists. There’s no indication they, or any other DJ streaming platform, are going to do this, but it seems like a no-brainer, especially if they then monetise that data on the label side to target a more tailored audience with a new release (sound familiar?).

TACKLING FRAUD

One final point I wanted to make is the potential for fraud. Spotify and other platforms are already awash with tales of streaming fraud, but given the higher royalty rate of 10c per play, and the fact that Beatport doesn’t identify where the track was played (i.e. in a bedroom or in a club), couldn’t someone just leave an automix running of their own music, 24/7 on mute? That could become very lucrative over time.

I asked Beatport what constitutes a ‘play’ and royalty ‘trigger’ and what fraud safeguards were in place. I wanted to include the full answer, given the importance of the topic:

Beatport employs a fraud team responsible for identifying behavior intended to manipulate plays. While 30 cumulative seconds of streaming on a track constitutes a play, this is not the only data point our team and systems monitor. We can not share the various triggers the fraud team looks for, but suffice it to say that Beatport’s team has years of experience identifying typical and atypical behaviors for our DJ users. While fighting such fraudulent activity is a constantly evolving process, our team does a great job of keeping up.
However, Beatport does acknowledge that DJ’s interact with music differently than a typical fan/listening experience. It is not typically passive (although it can be). A DJ may start and stop a track; jump back and forth between various tracks; and may play a track repetitively while working on their set (with no fraudulent intentions). Looping a track repetitively or playing 30 seconds of a track and restarting are not always considered typical DJ behaviors, but a DJ could certainly use a background loop while playing something else over it. This is why Beatport relies on several additional data points and human eyes to determine legitimacy.

I expect this won’t be the last time we discuss this topic.

INTO THE UNKNOWN

There are many, many unknowns about how this might play out. Reliable internet in clubs is far from common, and with no Wi-Fi on the CDJ-3000 (definitely one of the more bizarre decisions in modern music tech product releases), you can't even tether from your phone if you had 4G/5G as a backup. But infrastructure tends to come with demand, so the more DJs start to add ‘high-speed Ethernet internet connection’ to their tech riders, the more clubs will install them. Of course, there are many countries globally where stable high-speed internet simply isn’t available, especially in remote locations like festivals.

Maybe streaming will remain the tool of wedding and open format bar DJs, for whom it probably makes the most sense as it stands, and never make it into the world of the touring DJ. Maybe the technology will plug the data gap for PROs and result in accurate, faster and meaningful payments for producers. Maybe streaming will open up a new discovery route for newer DJs and provide a new revenue source as streaming and downloads co-exist during the transition.

Maybe handing one platform control is not a good thing, and the lessons we’ve learned from Spotify’s dominance will be repeated for electronic music, especially when it comes to controlling the data around what’s being played, where and by whom. Maybe we’ll see a repeat of visual media’s ever-growing list of streaming platforms as labels splinter off from Beatport, adding more and more subscriptions to our outgoings every month.

What we do know is this – artists and producers are suffering. Revenue streams are drying up across the board, while the cost of living crisis and the impact of the COVID pandemic has left the industry fragile. Although streaming offers a lot of positives and could solve many problems, we have to learn from the mistakes of the past to protect the future. That comes with knowledge and having an open dialogue from the start.

So often, artists are left behind as the tech industry’s never-ending need to ‘disrupt’ means they’re rarely at the table when their futures are decided. Convenience over culture has been the story of the consumer streaming age – it’s vital for the health of an already volatile industry to ensure those mistakes aren’t repeated.

P.S.: I appreciate it’s hard to create a snappy name for every new feature but, Cloud Direct Play? Mobile Library Sync? Cloud Library Sync? Streaming Direct Play? Device Library Backup? My head 😭

Other recommended stuff from the internet

My good friend Frank McWeeny has created a multi-part series for BBC Sounds called Global Dancefloor, exploring how electronic music is uniting communities across the planet. Episode one on Beirut is a must-listen.
BBC Three’s new documentary on the disgraced events company Pollen is just as wild as the stories that took it down.
Resident Advisor explores how changing DJ fees are affecting the industry.
Big Think’s latest long read on how the self might not exist is fascinating.
Water & Music partners with Refraction DAO on a new zine called What Good?
I wrote a new piece for Resident Advisor about how to use Discord as an artist.
Benn Jordan on ‘The Private Equity Buyout Of Music Production’

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