In 2014, SFX tasked its engineers with a rebuild of the Beatport store that they would brand as “Beatport Pro.”
Given the size and poor condition of the existing Beatport infrastructure, the company’s engineers simply could not take the necessary time to familiarize themselves with its architecture well enough to properly execute the Pro build in the time frame SFX allotted them.
“SFX is not a technological company,” a source said. “Because of that, they don’t understand that when you ask for something to be built more quickly, you get a shittier product.”
In a manner of speaking, Beatport Pro was built on “on top” of Beatport Classic, not into it. In programmer lexicon, the term “feature parity” refers to the principle that a system should be able to perform all the same functions as those with which it competes or is made to replace.
A source asserts that despite the programmers’ best efforts, Pro did not have full feature parity with Classic. The Classic architecture’s design made it difficult to integrate with Pro, but none of the engineers understood the classic systems well enough to provide a viable solution, and those who could had already been laid off.
On February 4th, 2015, Beatport geared up to take the Pro store live, after already running well behind on the ambitious deadline set by SFX. The switchover had been scheduled for early morning, but ended up being pushed back to the late afternoon. When they finally flipped the switch to split classic.beatport.com and beatport.com into two discrete platforms, the entire system nearly went down.
Because the classic architecture had been forced to bear the processing load of the Pro site instead of a more conventional update to the underlying architecture, Beatport’s staff scrambled to quickly diagnose issues and prepare fixes in an attempt to keep the systems online and stable. Immediately after the Beatport Pro launch, users began complaining of sluggish performance and a poor user experience on the Pro site, demanding a return to the Classic site.
SFX corporate stood on the sidelines and avoided issuing any public statements, even though by all logic they should have been the ones to take responsibility for the new product. As a result, shortly after the Pro launch numerous employees began thinking of planning exit strategies from the company. A source said, “They were just jumping ship and leaving to work for different companies.”
Even if you could tolerate the website’s functional issues, splitting the service into two separate platforms was bad for business. Users couldn’t navigate from Classic to Pro or vice-versa, meaning that if a customer didn’t already know that there were two URLs which corresponded to two platforms then they would only access the half of the library available in the site they visited.
After months of constant damage control with scarce improvements to Beatport’s functionality, SFX hired on yet another new crop of programmers. The board made an announcement that left the remaining employees in shocked disbelief. Demonstrating just how little they had actually learned from the Pro site’s catastrophic launch, the executives announced plans to also build a streaming service into Beatport’s existing interface.
A source observed:
Now we’re starting to establish a pattern in the way SFX deals with technology. They bring on an engineering team, build a new product on top of architecture that the team building the product does not understand, launch the project prematurely without feature parity – or in a state before which the product could be considered consumer ready – and then they let go of all those engineers.
Indeed, the engineers would take the streaming service live in the summer, requiring Beatport’s programmers to integrate parts of it with the Classic architecture. While the launch of the new feature didn’t turn out nearly as anomalous as that of the Pro store, the Classic architecture was then supporting the Pro store and portions of the streaming site – and what SFX’s executives did next would prove even more suspicious than any of their previous decisions.
Shortly after the launch of the streaming site, SFX rounded up all of the remaining engineers from the Pro build as well those who participated in the streaming service build and spun them off into a third-party agency called Postlight, which itself was founded by engineers previously employed by SFX.
A source speculated that SFX decided it would be too expensive to keep the engineers on payroll but sought to avoid another media circus like the one that resulted from their first round of layoffs.
“How do you get rid of 10-30 engineers without any negative press?” they posed. “You don’t fire them, you have somebody higher up create a new agency and just transfer your engineers to them so that they’re never out of a job and they never have to go looking for a job.”
Around the same time, two more Beatport fixtures finally reached their threshold. It might not have surprised too many of Stout’s colleagues that would eventually resign – he certainly didn’t keep his disdain for Sillerman and his cohorts a secret from the rest of the staff – but the resignation of Lloyd Starr felt like the end of an era for those who were more personally invested in the company culture.
The last of the founding programmers (whom had even been fired and rehired during his time as CEO and still stuck with the company), Starr’s unyielding dedication to the Beatport brand played no small part in fostering the team mentality that held what was left of the brand together, so the thought that such a stable personality losing enough faith in the company to quit shocked the remaining employees.
No matter its function, a company is defined first and foremost by the people who make it up – and to many, the day of Starr’s resignation from his position of CEO might as well have been the day that Beatport had finally broken.
