Alex Hixon’s Blog

Now, I’ll be honest. I haven’t bought much legitimate music lately, except for a couple albums I bought a few years back. I *would* buy LPs if I had a player that worked… But yes, shock, horror. I am a freeloader, to be fair.

Well, seeing as there was a multitude of songs that weren’t available on most P2P networks, I decided, hell, let’s at least have a look around and see if I could get songs elsewhere. Amazon’s MP3 downloads aren’t available in Australia, and iTunes is, well.. evil in so many different ways.

So, after looking around, I discovered Beatport (no, this isn’t one of those paid plugs, they’re just pretty cool). They provide a really large range of electronic music (incl. house, club, electro). The user interface is really nice, but it’s a bit annoying that they only provide Flash. But you can quickly go from song to song, artist to artist, finding songs you wouldn’t normally otherwise hear. It also provides 2-3 minute previews of songs (low quality of course). You can pay using PayPal or via credit card directly. What I did find annoying was that the songs are reasonably high priced to what I was expecting (something like from $1.49 for most tracks to $2.49 for newer ones), and that some tracks aren’t always available even though they’re in the catalogue, and some popular tracks they just don’t seem to have. Otherwise, I’ve been reasonably happy.

You can choose output formats of 320 Kbps CBR MP3, 192 Kbps VBR MP4 and 1141 Kbps WAV. They charge a WAV handling fee so that’s semi-lame, though, I can understand why.

If anybody has suggestions as to other similar websites, please comment and point me there. Also, anybody else used Beatport? What did you think of it?