Beatport
Helping scale the world largest online marketplace for electronic dance music (EDM) and DJ culture serving millions of users
MusictechCross Platform Integrated Solutions
2021 - 2024
Revolutionizing digital music distribution
Beatport is a digital music distribution company specializing in electronic dance music (EDM). It serves as a platform for DJs, producers, and music labels to buy, sell, and promote EDM tracks across a wide range of genres, including house, techno, trance, and dubstep. Beyond its extensive music catalog, Beatport provides a suite of tools and resources for artists and labels, such as analytics, marketing services, community forums, and live streaming events.
Process
Rapid Development
Continuous Delivery /
DevOps
Product Stage
Late Stage
Beatport in numbers
$M+
Revenue
M+
Site track downloads
M+
Users
$M+
Paid to independent dance music label
K+
DJ customers
K+
Playlists created on Beatport
Challenge
In order to stay competitive and maintain its leading position in the dynamic digital music industry, Beatport faced a number of challenges, including creating a more advanced engineering culture and process, modernizing outdated systems, integrating streaming services across a diverse range of DJ platforms, and ensuring scalability for future growth.
To address these complex needs due to different technical challenges and various tech stacks, we worked on multiple value streams inside Beatport and led several strategic initiatives to enhance the engineering team organization and process, platform's capabilities, streamline operations, reduce technical debt, and ultimately boost overall performance.
Solution
Strategic, organizational support and our first project
We started our collaboration with regular discovery meetings with the management team to understand the organizational and technical challenges and we contributed with ideas how to organize better, including more modern software design, discovery and engineering processes, supporting beatport management as consultants/advisors, sharing the best practices we have learned building modern software.
In parallel we started contributing to the Android SDK as a small project to get small wins in our collaboration and to validate we can run and deliver projects very efficiently.
Contributing across the product portfolio
After the initial projects we started getting involved across the product portfolio of Beatport - including Mobile, Web, Backend systems, while doing product management, UX/UI design, front-end and back-end development and SRE/DevOps work.
We have worked across different tech stacks like Python, C++, PHP, JavaScript and many other technologies in the diverse product ecosystem and dozens of different products inside Beatport.
New Ingestion system - enhancing music release efficiency
Beatport’s ingestion system, crucial for processing music releases, needed modernization to improve efficiency and reduce manual intervention. We restructured the XML parsers, rules processors, and database loaders, optimizing code organization for greater efficiency. This allowed for faster bug fixing and more streamlined workflows.
Also, these improvements resulted in faster and more automated processing of music releases, minimizing manual work and enabling quicker content publication, thus enhancing the user experience.
Ampsuite upgrade - modernizing legacy systems
Beatport’s Ampsuite, a core system for managing digital infrastructure, required upgrades to modernize outdated technology, improve maintainability, and ensure future scalability.
We upgraded PHP from version 7.4 to 8.2, reorganized code architecture, and adopted the PRS-4 autoloading standard. Security was strengthened with two-factor authentication, local development environments were set up, and client backups were implemented on GCP. These measures laid the groundwork for future cloud migration and system scalability.
As a result, an improved system stability and enhanced security provided a more reliable and scalable platform, addressing client concerns and preparing for future Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices. Ampsuite upgrades had a direct impact on customer success, resolving multiple issues that customers and clients faced in the past related to publishing new music content.
Beatport LINK Expansion - Extending Streaming Accessibility
Beatport LINK, the platform’s flagship streaming service, needed to expand its availability seamlessly across a wide range of DJ software and hardware solutions.
We enabled hardware integrations with major global partners and upgraded the Beatport SDK for compatibility across all platforms, including mobile. Additionally, we developed a streamlined SDK to reduce dependencies, facilitating lightweight, efficient integration, and introduced VR streaming capabilities to enhance user engagement.
Beatport LINK was successfully integrated across major DJ hardware and software platforms, including Pioneer, Engine DJ OS, and VR environments like Tribe XR DJ Academy. Enhancements to Beatport LINK made the platform accessible across numerous DJ environments, both hardware and software, ensuring DJs could stream seamlessly from their favorite tools.
- Python
- FastAPI
- GCP - Pub/Sub, Kubernetes, BigQuery
- AlloyDB
- PHP 8.2
- Javascript and JQuery 1.2
- MariaDB
- Plesk 16
- C++ 14/17
- CMake
- Conan
Where are we at now?
From refining backend systems to expanding streaming services across various hardware and software, the solutions we deliver are aimed at enhancing the customer experience while keeping Beatport at the forefront of digital music distribution.
Given Beatport's diverse business units, assessing the impact of each solution can be challenging. Despite these complexities, our team remains committed to providing daily support across various problems, features, and technical debts. By aligning with Beatport's broader company goals, we strive to add consistent value, enhance system reliability, and ensure the platform remains as bug-free as possible.
Our work continues to ensure that Beatport remains a leader in the electronic dance music industry, providing innovative solutions for artists, DJs, and music enthusiasts around the world. With the client’s trust, we’ll continue contributing and evolving multiple in-house projects to a whole new level in order the make Beatport the best online platform for electronic dance music.
Ministry of Programming was a great partner with us as we were transitioning our technology organization in a new direction.
They worked with Beatport not as an agency but in a partnership helping us establish new practices and a new engineering culture. They were a pleasure to work with and demonstrated flexibility to accommodate our needs!
If you're looking to augment your organization or build new products, I recommend working with MOP to achieve your goals.
Sean M. Sullivan
Chief Technology Officer (CTO) - Beatport
How we supported Nordic Angels in making a profound impact on the Nordic startup ecosystem
