Holy shit 360 tracks a day! And this is just beatport. Its an A&R nightmare. If 1% of those tracks were top quality it means we would be blessed with 3 a day, meaning a lot of great music just in one sub-genre by the end of the year. I like house music but I probably find 25-40 a year I like, with a lot of searching. So what's happening?
Pretty sure lots of those are straight-up garbage. I would say a lot are also re-releases, or multiple releases of the same songs.
This is why if you want quality music you're better off browsing in
Selected,
TheSoundYouNeed,
Majestic Casual, and other similar Youtube channels that consistently upload good songs. Not everything is going to be
great, but you are more likely to find quality there versus clicking on thousands of Beatport songs.
If labels adhered to more quality control they might just go under? Or be left waiting months for something worthy to release. I think they are so poor that they just release as much as they can and hope to scrape small gains of each release. Maybe thats too cynical.
Not really the labels fault that no one wants to spend money on music anymore and that all the producers forgot how to make decent tracks. Difficult to know if they are shaping things/making things worse with this low bar to entry or if they are just dealing with the problem the best they can.
We would need cash $ numbers to figure out what's happening with all these labels. I don't know how much it costs to set up a digital label and distribute music on Beatport. I don't know how large mastering expenses are (if any - I would bet many of these labels spend 0 on mastering). I don't know if producers get paid upfront when they "sign" a track with some label. If they
do get paid upfront, I don't know how much they would get paid. I don't know what kind of fees Beatport charges before any music sales are made.
There are lots of unknowns, so we can only go by Occam's razor.
My guess is that a lot of these tracks are not mastered professionally, so the producers are doing whatever they can. In fact, I would assume that most producers aren't even thinking about mastering other than equalizing a few things here and there. Sure, maybe some producers will master their own track, but it would likely be a negligible amount.
I would also assume that Beatport is charging labels negligible fees to distribute music on their platform. If Beatport's fees were large, we would not see this many releases. I would also assume it doesn't matter if you are releasing a single track, an EP, or a full-blown album. In each case, Beatport charges negligible fees.
I think most electronic producers don't get paid upfront any amount to sign their tracks. Sure, the artist are likely promised a % of the profits due to sales, but that does not matter when you're just releasing a track. In other words, the artists are handing in their work for free to the label so the label can distribute it on Beatport. I would not be surprised if some labels even
charged the artist in a "pay for exposure" style.
My conclusion is that tight QC wouldn't make these labels go under. It's not like they have people on their pay roll, or they are making a lot of money to begin with. Your cynical comment sounds the most accurate, but I don't think it's because the labels are "poor." I would say it's more from the labels just being cheap, and the label owners treating music like a side-hustle to gain some quick, effortless cash.