Beatport, the leading online music store for electronic music, has launched the third generation of its digital download service with several enhancements and new features. The upgrades are not just for the music buyer, but also for the many labels who sell their releases through Beatport.com.

Customers will immediately notice that the site is much faster. Graphics and music now load instantaneously on broadband connections and content delivery now takes a fraction of the time it took on slower connections. A basic music recommendation utility, dubbed "Users Also Bought," and a "Email To A Friend" viral suggestion tool have also been implemented.

The new Beatport.com homepage

Jonas Tempel, Beatport's CEO, understands the uphill battle electronic music fans face when trying to locate the music they desire. "With the increasing popularity in online digital retail of electronic music, customers are sifting through more and more music to find what they want," Tempel observes. "Currently, Beatport has content from over 3000 label partners, and finding that gem of a track from an obscure artist or label can be difficult. To address this problem, Beatport 3.0 uses sophisticated tools to push content to the user that matches their buying taste."

"My Beatport" is another new feature which allows a customer to subscribe to their favorite artist, label, or genre. The system then notifies the user via email when one of their subscriptions has a new music entry. "My Beatport allows a customer to subscribe to up to 100 artists and labels making it easy to find new releases from their favorites," Tempel explains.

The Beatport catalog exceeds 100,000 tracks and more than 3000 songs and new releases are added to the site each week. For more information hit Beatport.com

The Future: The performance increases and "My Beatport" feature make version 3.0 a worthy upgrade. For version 4.0 we'd love to see more detailed descriptions of individual tracks (like you find in many vinyl shops) and many more sub-genres to assist in pre-selecting tracks. For instance, it would be very beneficial for a chart entry to be listed as: D-Formation's "Clever Scape" Beat Freak - Deep, yet Funky Progressive House or DJ DLG "Latin Bomb" Huge - Banging Peak Hour Funky Latin House. In addition, many relevant sub-genres, such as Tribal House are not even listed in the Genre category and should be included.

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