Beatports New President in Conversation with Billboard

Lloyd Starr, recently crowned President of Beatport was in conversation with Billboard to discuss all things EDM and download farms (online services that purchase a song over and over to help it rise in the charts). What ensued was an interesting discussion pertaining to the mega brands music philosophy and what EDM really is.

He goes on to say the following about EDM, “I don’t really have any issue with ‘EDM’. The industry came up with — not really the industry, the community — came up with that term, so it’s here, right? You embrace it and I embrace it. Where I think it’s confusing is, what is it really? Is it a genre, or is it a scene? It’s certainly popular and we’ve had tons of philosophical debates about what it is and how should we represent it in our store.”  

When it comes to the so called ‘download farms’, he was rather cut and dry: “First of all, f**k those guys. It is bullshit what they’re doing. They’re attacking the credibility of everybody else who’s made it into a list before them. We recently took a stance on to let our position be known. We have some really cool tools with some really smart people working on how we deal with that reactively, and we’re building in functionality to deal with that proactively. So yeah, it’s really unfortunate byproduct of the popularity of getting into our charts. That’s something I’m really passionate about.”

Talk about not mincing your words! Catching them however, proves to be a little daunting: “It’s a cat-and-mouse game. The fraudsters do what they can to defeat our tools, and we have to outsmart them. So we keep all that very proprietary and internal, just like any other fraud mitigation software or tool on the market.” 

Read about all this and more in the entire interview on Billboard!