Beatport Will Remove Tracks That Have Never Sold

Everyone in the electronic music industry knows there’s dramatically more music being released than there is music that people want to listen to or DJ with. But what happens when one of the biggest online stores for digital music starts pruning their collection?

Starting late this year, Beatport is starting a “yearly storage clean-up procedure” to trim their back catalog only of tracks that have never sold. It will start at the end of the previous calendar year – so for instance, this year’s cleanup will remove tracks with sales released prior to January 1, 2019.

Friend-of-DJTT Jason Wohlstadter (you might recognize his name, he’s being behind Proton Radio and Crates.co) shared a letter from Beatport earlier today:

Jason also aptly noted in his own post on Proton’s help knowledge base:

The cleanup is only happening on Beatport, so tracks will *not* be removed from other platforms. However, TraxSource has a similar cleanup every 2 years.

What do you think? Should labels and artists view online stores as eternal backups and never-ending archives of music released, or is this type of pruning good for the ecosystem? In the world of physical media, it would not be uncommon to see the unsold albums end up in a free bin outside of the store.