A while ago now, your favourite blog spoke about Beatport Link. There appears to be money to be made in streaming – certainly not for the artists, but plenty for the labels and plenty for the streaming platforms themselves. Hence why Daniel Ek is worth billions and the average songwriter is broke.

So it’s no mystery why Beatport are getting into the streaming game. Indeed, I strongly suspect a number of other digital dance music stores are looking closely at how they get on. But the question I posed, because I simply couldn’t work it out, was – who is Beatport Link actually aimed at?

Well, a quick look at the terms and conditions of Beatport Link’s service reveals a clue. It turns out it doesn’t cover you for using it in nightclubs – that requires a public performance licence…

This leaves one or two interesting dilemmas. Such as how this policy would be enforced. Let’s say a DJ uses Beatport Link in a nightclub and it turns out this venue has no public performance licence. How would Beatport know the user had used the service improperly?

It also results in a situation where you could use Beatport Link to practice your DJing at home – but later potentially discover you don’t have a copy of a certain track you were hoping to play. Strictly speaking, you can’t actually use Beatport Link to record a set to post on Soundcloud – because they don’t have the licences required for this purpose. Again, how would Beatport stop it?

The simple truth is they can’t – and they probably know it. Either way, I just don’t see this streaming service becoming dance music’s own Spotify…