The dance music world is today in shock after the announcement this morning that Beatport is to close with the loss of 90 jobs. The company which was acquired by Freefiles Inc. (owners of file-sharing site Zippyshare.com among others) in November of last year, stated that “despite high profits and a growing customers base we are to cease trading from October 29th 2013. All credit on customer accounts will remain valid up until that point”.
CEO of Freefiles Inc. Bartholomew Sharp, went on record this morning to say “It has always been our intention to wind up Beatport’s operations, our purchase late last year was always a strategic move rather than a standard take-over bid. Our flagship site Zippyshare seen its downloads grow by over 300% last year. It is more popular than ever and our advertising and malware income is growing rapidly because of it. Since the closure of sites likes Megaupload and Fileserve among many others in January 2012, our only main competitor has been Beatport. They have a more comprehensive selection of tracks and made it much easier for music to be found. If users cannot get a track on Beatport or don’t have the funds, they come to Zippyshare instead. It made sense to take our biggest competitor out of the game completely. Facebook did it with instagram, now we are doing it with Beatport”
He went on to state “The purchase and wind down has a two-fold benefit. We now also own Beatport’s entire music library and can make it available via Zippyshare.com, hopefully increasing our advertising revenue in 2014”
Industry experts are today questioning what Freefiles Inc. will do with the 24 million user accounts on Beatport’s database after its closure, with some fears they may breach data protection laws by transferring the users details over to their Zippyshare site, targeting victims with free high quality music downloads on a daily basis.
What do you think of the closure? Where will you turn for your music downloads now that Beatport is gone? Leave your comments below.
