The first Beatport Music Awards had one very obvious winner.
Deadmau5 won Best Electro House Artist, Best Progressive House Artist, and Best Single for "Not Exactly." He was also voted the most influential, forward-thinking, and relevant person in electronic music for 2007.
That was four wins from a 19-category ballot.
The process started with the store's 2007 unit sales. Those numbers produced the nominee list. Registered Beatport users then had six weeks to vote. Thousands of people participated, and the final results covered the genre map Beatport was selling every day.
Armin van Buuren won trance. Dubfire won minimal and techno. Trentemøller won electronica and chill out. High Contrast won drum and bass. Modeselektor won dubstep and grime. The list went on.
The awards were public-facing and fun. Underneath them was a data product. The store had enough activity to turn customer purchases into a credible shortlist across dozens of electronic music scenes. Beatportal gave the company somewhere to run the ballot and publish the result.
I was on the technology side. My responsibility was not deciding whether the winners were right. It was helping make sure the systems behind the store and the surrounding products could handle what the business was becoming.
That distinction mattered because it kept happening. The company would launch something that looked like music, media, community, or marketing from the outside. Inside, every new surface added traffic, data, dependencies, support questions, and another thing that had to stay online.
The first awards ended with a list of winners. They also showed that Beatport was no longer only a place to buy a track. It had enough reach to ask the audience what mattered and get thousands of answers.
Deadmau5 got more of those answers than anybody else.