Last week brought about a curious incident in the dance music press. A number of outlets published stories about Beatport Party Mode – a soon to be introduced feature on their DJing app. We shall explain this later – but barely days after these press features appeared, they subsequently disappeared again.

After the story was apparently scrubbed from their pages, the cleanup operation followed – and most of the outlets didn’t really bother, with dead links to the original story still visible on social media. And naturally enough, whenever anything like this happens, Ears To The House gets suspicious.

As far as we could see, the articles – since deleted, but mostly still available on Google’s cache service and still listed on Google itself – weren’t defamatory, nor was there any legal reason for their removal. So what’s the answer to the mystery? The answer is actually quite simple – it turns out Beatport’s Party Mode is simply not ready yet.

We reached out to Beatport’s PR operation last Friday and received a response yesterday by Farah Syed – she’s in charge of PR and Industry Relations at the site. After getting over our shock at getting a reply to our email on a Sunday, she explained “That was an unfortunate incident as we were setting up a press demo” for a music magazine who we’ve chosen not to name.

They subsequently published an article, which caused a “ripple effect” where “a few outlets picked it up”. Syed further elaborated that “We had not sent out any press releases which is what we would always do for a large product launch. This is an exciting launch for us and some press have been teased and demo-ed since early this year through our Microsoft partnership that had elements of Party Mode integrated.”.

Now, for those of you wondering, Party Mode is a feature which will allow DJs to connect and play together remotely. Whilst the finer details won’t be available until launch – it’s in September and Beatport are sending us a press release when it happens – it means a DJ in London can play with someone in Chicago at the same time.

As Ears To The House firmly believes that the Metaverse is very much part of dance music’s future, we shall be covering it closely when the time comes. But unlike another outlet, we might actually wait until they’re ready to launch before putting Beatport’s Party Mode under the microscope…