Beatport have announced alterations to their website that they claim will improve the users experience by “prolonging the amount of time spent mindlessly scrolling” and that they’ll still struggle “to find anything remotely decent”.
The company has installed new features designed to make shopping on the site an even more frustrating and fruitless experience by purposely misclassifying genres, giving prominence to blander tunes and making the cursor move ever so slightly quicker.
“The more challenging we make the Beatport experience,” explained CEO Matthew Adell. “The longer the user stays online and the more ad revenue we get. We don’t actually lose money because even if the user leaves disappointed they’ll end up coming back to buy whatever tracks our charts say are big at the moment so it doesn’t really matter.”
“Based on how long people spend looking for music on the site the research shows us that the pleasure that people get from using Beatport must be almost entirely from the experience of shopping and browsing rather than actually buying anything, and we’re responding to that with our new features like shortening track preview lengths.”
“We’ve also got a new colour scheme on the site that makes the user more bored and amenable to a state we like to call ‘scroll trance’, which although it sounds like a genre of dance music we’ve just made up, it isn’t,” he laughed. “Yet.”
“I think it’s a great idea, I spend most of my time on Beatport frustratingly looking for tracks to add to my cart and never play again,” said Beatport user Mike Cooper. “The new features make that easier.”
“Browsing tracks fruitlessly for 6 hours a day is what DJing is all about,” he concluded. “I’m glad that just because I’m a digital DJ doesn’t mean I’m missing out on the DJing art of digging.”
Mr. Adell stated that the new edition of Beatport will be live sometime in April.
