
Digital download store Beatport.com has been experiencing a significant drop in traffic recently. The Alexa chart above shows that Beatport's trafic reach has declined almost 70% in past few months.
Although Beatport's biggest rival DJDownload.com is thriving and German-based Kompakt-MP3 is increasing its traffic constantly, there seems to be some sort of a trouble going on at Beatport.
There have been many rumours and speculations circulating on the web, as well as on numerous popular music forums and discussion boards, that Beatport's enormous drop in traffic could in fact be caused due to its recent price hike.
A Beatport representative posted the following message on a popular forum:
"Beatport is an all Flash site and when we re-launched version 3.0, we did so with the indexing functionality disabled. As an "all flash" e-commerce site, the standard crawlers don't function with Beatport like other sites, so we have to "build" that functionality in. So, currently, the crawlers aren't seeing Beatport like they previously did - hence the apparent "drop off" in traffic (Completely False)."
To be perfectly honest, a drop like that just because of a slightly changed prices is in fact impossible. Let's see how will the trafic look like after Beatport indexes its site.
Any site made entirely in Flash should die a horrible, violent and bloody death...
Nothing against beatport - just that flash sucks hairy monkey balls and should be killed.
Hey, Flash has its uses. More to the point, they just did some serious damage to their search engine optimization. I expect there should be a way around that, even with Flash.
To be honest, I don't like the new search engine at all - it just makes the search and browsing more complicated.
I'm sorry that I'll post a link to my blog but I think it has great relevance and I don't want to write about the same thing twice. I just wrote this out of pure frustration: Beatport's support department sucks ass.
Also, I guess you could include junodownload.com in the traffic chart too.
Funny thing, though. A few hours after posting that weblog entry the issue got solved...
And the link.
beatport needs quality control...
Hey Guys- It's true, we currently don't have our site indexed. Beatport 3.0 uses dynamic redirects, such as http://www.beatport.com/Bad+Boy+Bill
We used to have pages like this indexed (Beatport 2.0) but just haven't implemented it with the entirely new structure of Beatport 3.0.
Beatport is alive & well and doing better than ever :P
Beatport has some decent music- if you like it commercial) but the design is a joke.
Compared to all of the other big music stores online, the "flash" format just sucks period. I am constantly re-installing flash to even view Beatport past the info/requires flash page, when every other website in the world runs great... seems strange that I only have problems with Beatport.
I seriously think that this is a big contributing factor to the drop in sales- I for one, usually dont buy there anymore for this simple reason alone.
IMO there should be the option of flash/no flash.
Yeah, I'll agree with Janos on their support problems. A little over a week ago I purchased 25 tracks. To make a long story short, all but 3 tracks were cut short. Some problem with the download for sure, and not saying it was theirs...but could well have been. Anyhow, no problem, according to their FAQ, you can ask them to reactivate the download links. (I went to sleep while they were downloading, so didn't notice the problem until the next day.) So far I've sent 4 emails asking...no, begging to get these tracks. I've gotten nothing back from them. Nothing.
I used to spend a good deal of money there....but now I'm thinking of trying those other sites quoted in the article.
Yeah, their support sucks. Oh, and seems their forums have been undergoing 'maintenance' for some time now. Hmmmm....(in reference to Janos' blog entry on their forums)
Glenn
Hi there,
I've spent some money on beatport and i've the same problem of Glenn, some tracks are incomplete. I've have problems like communication error appearing on my account and yesterday when i'm will going to check out, appears a new problem for me gateway fraud error, i don't have any problem with my credit card before.
The worst on beatport is the support customer service and the site in flash is a nice piece of shit, i think the people is now searching music in other sites, junodownload, djdownload, mos, trackitdown, playittonight and so on.
cheers,
Smallhousen
Anyone with the stupid error "gateway fraud error" ??
I have opend 4 different accounts in beatport and when i'm going to checkout the result is the same in all 4 accounts: "gateway fraud error"