Beatport had enough sales data to hand out its own awards.
Voting opened across 19 categories. Most were organized by genre, from trance and house to techno, drum and bass, minimal, dubstep, and hard dance. There were also awards for a single, a remix, and the most influential person in electronic music.
The nominee list came from unit sales on Beatport during 2007. Registered users got the final vote.
That was the part I liked. The awards were not pretending the store had no opinion about music. The genres, category rules, and final public vote were all choices. But the first pass came from what customers had actually bought.
By then Beatport was carrying hundreds of thousands of tracks from thousands of labels. Every sale produced another piece of information about what was moving, where it was moving, and which artists were building momentum. The store was also running Beatportal, so the company had a place to publish the nominations and turn a transaction history into a larger conversation.
I was responsible for the technology underneath the company, not for choosing the winners. My view of an event like this started with less glamorous questions. Would the voting stay up? Could registered users get through it? What happened when a large artist sent a lot of people at once?
That was normal. The public side was artists, tracks, fans, and a new award. The systems side was traffic, databases, storage, and the steady work of keeping it all available.
Voting was scheduled to run through April 22. For six weeks, electronic music fans could argue with a list built from the previous year's sales and then make a different list of their own.
Nineteen categories gave them plenty to argue about.