I’ve been a DJ for as long as my professional career, so it comes as no surprise to some people that I download most of my music purchases (around 80%) from Beatport, not iTunes or any other large-scale online music store. Beatport on the other hand caters to the DJ market. I was an early adapter of the now popular Traktor DJ software, which stemmed from selling my turntables and having nothing to play my records on, so MP3′s were the next best bet since I’m on a computer for most of the day. I’ve been using Beatport since it was launched in 2004, just before I moved to Boston. The reason being, initially, because I dabble a lot in the Deep House and Techno genres, at the time iTunes didn’t carry much, if not any, of the specific artists and labels I was looking for in a digital format. And it’s been that way ever since, though the last few years have been much better, only because Apple has one of the biggest market shares in music sales now, and the artists in these somewhat obscure genres have obviously seen the benefit of the iTunes platform to sell their music.

So with the new iteration of iTunes being released a couple of weeks ago, along with the rest of the world, I was quite excited to see what the makeover would bring with it. Besides the visual update, there really hasn’t been a change yet in the iTunes Store since it was launched n the early 00′s. How so, you ask? As a person who explores many ways of finding new music, the iTunes store really doesn’t have a great system of searching and discovering music. Besides the new releases, global search bar, and the typical ‘Listeners Also Bought’ area, they are missing one vital element that most DJ’s and music lovers use rather frequently to find and discover music: you cannot search by the record label.

Back in the day, a lot of DJ’s would buy records based purely on label (though to find the label you had to wade through highly organized artists or genres) mainly because good labels have consistently good music. You’d find out who the artist was later, and then perhaps follow the artist. To the average person, using these kinds of navigation elements that iTunes has to find music, probably is more than enough. For DJ’s this just doesn’t cut it. Call me old, but the main search tool I use is browsing by labels. Beatport boasts a healthy serving of transparent search options for finding and discovering new labels, artists, tracks, charts and more. So much so that I could write another post as a heuristic analysis on these options. When I look at how frequently Beatport updates and adds to areas of their site, mainly to create a better user experience, its typically a new tool to discover new music, not highlight latest releases. Recently they released a tool called the Beatbot. I’m not exactly sure what kind of algorithm this works on, though it does a good job of finding similar and related tracks to a current track you’re listening to, if you choose to see what the Beatbot can find for you. My guess is it works on either the tempo, key or label as a basis for finding more music that you *may* like or find similar to what you’re currently listening to. And it’s pretty spot on, as far as recommending tracks written in the same key, with some of the artists and labels it has recommended for me. I’ve have discovered a lot of new, and old labels and artists with tracks I’d never heard that I would never had though to look for, unless I heard it elsewhere. Though this is great new and an easy way of discovery, I still keep going back to browsing by labels.

iTunes is a great application, and it does me fine to use it as a library to house my music and media in a nice organized fashion. I just don’t buy much or any music from the store because my search for new or unheard music ends about 5 minutes after getting into the store, purely because the search results and ‘this person bought’ scenario seems to lead me back to the same music I originally viewed, or leads or away from what I’m interested in. This doesn’t just apply to electronic music either. I think my point in this is that Apple needs to look closer at how other music and media stores build their user experiences and search tools. As I mentioned, they have a huge market share of music sales globally, and I’m sure they are missing out on a big portion of these sales due to overlooking or not researching into how the different types of people who account for a lot of the promotion and sales of music, are actually using the store. It seems like a rather small, overlooked search item that many music lovers would include automatically in the architecture of any music store. Think about the physical record store, you could ask the person who worked there what releases they had in stock on a certain label, and they usually would know or be able to look it up in the inventory. Please Apple, lets get some label searching going soon–you’ll make more money, I guarantee.