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Picture it: Gotham City, 2008. You’re out at your favorite club, the music is loud, and you’re grinding and writhing with the cutie of your choice. From the look in his or her eyes, you like where this is going; though you doubt it’s going anywhere important at all. Except, perhaps, back to your apartment. (Shit, why didn’t you clean up the joint first?) By night’s end, the music overhead has become your personal anthem for another successful night out. After all, nothing says “true love” - or you know, momentary lust - like a wailing diva or divo over a hard, thumping beat. But once you scour iTunes to buy some of the fierce tracks that you (vaguely) recall loving, you’re met with disappointment. The dance music catalogue is as outdated as your grandfather’s collection of disco vinyls, and its idea of chart-topping hits includes “Sandstorm” and “that annoying song about being Blue, da ba dee.” How very… Class of ’98. What’s a club hopper, laptop DJ, or average dance music fan to do? Enter your superhero to the rescue: Brett Henrichsen, the superstar DJw and now founder of Masterbeat, an online music store that’s poised to bring the club scene mass appeal. “ “We’re in the middle of another format change,” says Henrichsen about the decision to concentrate on the digital sales market. “Just like CDs replaced cassettes, the internet is replacing CDs. We [the dance music industry] have to reinvent ourselves.” If reinvention is the mission, consider it accomplished. Henrichsen harnessed years of experience as a revered club DJ and record label founder – plus years of frustration in trying to find his favorite tunes – to create the concept of Masterbeat. The site has grown exponentially since the launch of its Beta site at the start of the year: with limited label partnerships, the online storefront opened with 5,000 tracks. It’s now closing in on 250,000 and, when the full site launches, that number will near one million. Henrichsen conceived Masterbeat’s vast selection over years of frustration in trying to find his favorite dance tunes. As one of the world’s hottest (literally and figuratively) circuit DJs, he was blown away (alas, just figuratively) by how difficult it was to track down even the most popular tracks of the moment; commercial singles were typically unavailable until weeks after songs became succe “Dance music has an incredibly short shelf life,” says Henrichsen. “When people go home from the club at night, they don’t want to wait. If they heard the new Madonna or Kristine W, they want it right away.” If fans don’t have immediate access, he says, the dance genre’s sales suffer. Most online stores (like the ubiquitous iTunes) require weeks of lead time to get tracks posted, something that is totally impractical when club anthems rely on of-the-minute remixes. Masterbeat offers an innovative tech solution, a back-end interface (dubbed “Control”) that lets record labels manage their own online catalogue: uploading new releases, providing artwork and full-track music samples, conducting email marketing and more. By letting labels take a self-administrative approach, Masterbeat ensures that songs are available for immediate gratification; and while you’re still buzzed enough to blow your entire wad on that last DJs awesome set list.
Diva Divo • copyright 2007 • kurtmalecdesigns.com
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For so long, the average consumer couldn’t buy their favorite dance songs,” says Henrichsen, founder and President of Masterbeat. In January 2008, after ten years of producing successful compilation albums, Masterbeat went digital by launching the world’s largest online store exclusively for dance music (
ssful in the club scene. As a result, he says, dance music sales took a nosedive as illegal downloads and file sharing became the only option to score tracks while they were still at their peak of popularity.