We recently reported on a series of layoffs at Beatport‘s San Francisco and Denver offices and today Beatport’s parent company, SFX, has offered a statement in response to the slashing. In a phone interview with Billboard, Tim Crowhurst, the president of SFX, stated that the layoffs were in an effort “to restructure the team and get everyone focused on one vision.”
SFX has been slowly acquiring EDM related companies over the past year in an attempt to streamline the way in which EDM is shared, discovered and experienced. The layoffs represent a commercialization of the culture and the poison that a corporation injects into a scene when trying to appease shareholders. Crowhurst claims that the restructuring will benefit the EDM world but to the 26 or so engineers who are going to struggle during the holiday season, this was an unforeseen slap in the face.
“This shift is more about product vision than it is cost savings,” Crowhurst says. “We’ve got a pretty exciting roadmap that will leverage some of the best technology out there to essentially create a new future for this industry.”
“We’re making it more of a product-focused company as opposed to an engineering company,” he says. “We’re very focused on creating end-products that the community and all of our constituencies are going to love.”
Moving forward, Beatport plans to add more features and simplify their current interface. There will be an emphasis on the Beatport Play remix competition service, which will see a boost in funding both domestically and internationally.
“We see a really massive opportunity in this space to fill,” he said. “It’s a widely fragmented industry in terms of where people get their news and information, where they discover content, where they listen to content, where they discover events and where they buy tickets. Our vision is to create a much more cohesive experience for the fan and every piece here has a significant role to play.”
We will be staying on this story so stay tuned to YourEDM because no matter what happens with SFX it has become apparent that they have grown to the point where they will have a direct effect on the entire EDM community. Hopefully it will be a positive one but with this rocky start, there is not a lot of faith to run on.
Source: Billboard