Beatport launches ‘leftfield house and techno’ genre category

Beatport has added ‘Leftfield House & Techno’ as a new genre category.

The new addition is Beatport’s latest attempt to separate more mainstream electronic music from underground productions, and features music from labels including American techno label The Bunker New York, DJ Haus’ Unknown To The Unknown and Craig Richards’ The Nothing Special.

Speaking in a statement about the change, Beatport general manager Terry Weerasinghe said, “70% of the tracks sold on Beatport fall squarely in our House and Techno genres, so we wanted to do something to highlight the high-quality underground releases that people could miss amongst the 25,000 new tracks that appear each week.

“Beatport have worked directly with smaller, boutique labels to make an area on the site which will shine a light on off-kilter, lo-fi, avant-garde house and techno.”

Beatport’s parent company SFX Entertainment, who went into administration last year and is now known as LiveStyle, revealed that it was auctioning Beatport to alleviate debts in January last year, after filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy due to making a loss of $5.5m (£3.82m) in 2015. It subsequently announced it was “suspending” the process of the digital music platform’s sale last May.

Rob McCallum is DJ Mag’s deputy digital editor. Follow him on Twitter here.