If Beatport was broken, though, SFX was about to shatter into pieces. September of 2015 saw SFX’s stock value plummet even further, and because Sillerman had also failed in his attempts to take the company private again, SFX-owned promotional company ID&T was forced to cancel the inaugural edition of One Tribe, a festival which the company had eagerly anticipated as a means of kicking off their expansion into the West Coast market.
By the end of the month, though, everyone working for SFX Entertainment forgot all about One Tribe. The disaster that befell the 2015 edition of Atlanta, Georgia festival TomorrowWorld would elicit a deluge of public outcry heavier than the rainstorms which were supposed to have caused it.
TomorrowWorld’s organizers (also ID&T) cited rainstorms as the cause of not only massive and inconvenient mud puddles on the festival grounds, but also transportation breakdowns that endangered thousands of attendees by leaving them stranded near the venue overnight as well. When inconsistencies in their story began to surface, spokespeople for ID&T issued public statements littered with vague claims which they carefully worded to imply further that the organizers had been in no way responsible.
To this day, as they are all employees of SFX-owned companies, those who worked behind the scenes on TomorrowWorld 2015 nervously adhere to the vow of silence imposed upon them. Nonetheless, rumors began to permeate the veil of secrecy – like that SFX couldn’t pay one or more shuttle drivers, or that the page of the festival organizers’ contingency plan dedicated to the possibility of rain storms had been left blank leading up to the show.
While it may still take much longer for actual accounts of what transpired on the production side to reach to the public, either rumor would fit the track record for the irresponsible business practices that SFX has established for itself. Even without the truth reaching the surface, its reputation throughout the industry suffered to the point that it lost partnerships with Spotify and TMWRK in December, effectively bookending an abhorrent 2015 for Sillerman and his constituency.
As of the bankruptcy filing, it has come to light that Robert Sillerman will no longer serve as CEO of whatever form a restructured SFX Entertainment might take, and will serve as a chairman on the board of directors while they move to elect a new one. However, it’s safe to assume that had the decision been left up to those who run the various companies owned by SFX, Sillerman would be excommunicated from working professionally in the EDM industry altogether.
Anyone with a personal investment in electronic music must have recognized the potential for debasement of its culture as soon as Sillerman arrived on the scene. In his 2012 Billboard shoot, a handkerchief tucked in his pocket had the words “Fuck off” embroidered onto it, and in the accompanying interview it was a “universal statement” he wanted to make.
He elaborated:
I don’t know whether it’s directed at a specific individual, or a type of individual, or more as my interpretation of Albert Einstein’s fabulous quote: ‘No problem can ever be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.’ And that’s what I’ve done my whole life. So what he said so eloquently, I say, ‘Fuck off.’
Looking back on the past four years, you have to give Sillerman credit for one thing: “Fuck off” perfectly sums up the way he’s run his company – and after the damage that’s ensued as a result, the sentiment is quite universal.
Under the circumstances, it would behoove the aging mogul to go back and reinterpret Einstein’s quote. SFX Entertainment has become EDM’s biggest problem, and his “level of consciousness” should be as absent as possible from the company’s operations moving forward.
Whether or not all companies presently owned by SFX will be sold or remain under its ownership as part of the restructuring agreement remains to be seen, but thankfully, most of them appear optimistic about their post-SFX future – even Beatport.
A post to the download platform’s website following the announcement of SFX’s bankruptcy filing assured its users that its company operations were “business as usual.” Beatport appears to be in the process of rolling out a version of its services tailored to the Dutch market, as well as a new file format for Native Instruments called Launched Stems, among other things.
When Starr stepped down as CEO of Beatport last year, his position was filled by former SFX COO Greg Consiglio. Consiglio’s transfer was initially met with skepticism from the company’s understandably jaded employees. Their previous experiences with SFX gave them reason to doubt that one of the floundering corporation’s former executives would be any better equipped to make decisions on the company’s behalf.
Unlike the previous SFX officials who played a role in the company’s business operations, however, Consiglio appears to have taken a more involved role in the outcome of Beatport. He’s known for taking the advice of the company’s employees, and because he served on SFX’s board of directors, SFX takes his advice – resulting in a period during which the online music marketplace’s employees have been able to reclaim their company and take the first steps towards restoring it to functionality. At this point it’s in Beatport’s best interest for another company to buy it from SFX Entertainment, and at the rate it’s going that’s likely to happen sooner than later.
Just how services like Beatport and the manifold streaming platforms used by music consumers have earned the market’s favor in a way that the big four record labels can’t control, it’s worth noting that the music itself also spreads in a way that is seemingly random. A fluid cultural phenomenon that resists the deliberations of opportunists seeking to profit from it financially, electronic music in all its iterations is the soundtrack to the information revolution. Whether or not the EDM bubble has or will burst, the music itself isn’t going anywhere.
As far as Roulier is concerned, even though he’s been out of the company for years he doesn’t anticipate Beatport going anywhere, either – even if he attributes much of the company’s success to it filling a niche that opened up fifteen years prior. “We made a product that the market wanted,” he said. “With the transformation from vinyl to digital music, there had to be a content provider that was really cool and had all the good stuff. It was just a time and a place.”
