Beatport had a license intended to cover all 27 countries in the European Union.
The agreement was with Buma/Stemra, the Dutch music-rights organization. Beatport had reportedly spent about eighteen months working through the problem of paying rights holders as the Denver store expanded across Europe.
One agreement was supposed to replace separate licenses in every country.
If it worked as announced, Beatport would not need a separate license for every EU country covered by the agreement.
The announcement concerned the licenses required to sell music across European territories. It did not say that every right in every recording had become identical or that national rights organizations had disappeared.
I was running Beatport's technology from Denver. My daily work was servers, networks, databases, storage, and the people keeping them up. The agreement had reportedly taken about eighteen months of company work, but the announcement did not assign that work to me.
The agreement was announced as a first. It put one European license for an American online music store beside the older structure of national rights organizations and territories.
The announcement said the agreement followed about eighteen months of work. It was signed July 17 and made public five days later.
The stated plan was one license covering an online store across 27 countries. The announcement did not say that Beatport had replaced every other contract involved in selling the music.
The company had announced an agreement intended to cover the full EU instead of handling one country at a time. Whether it worked exactly that way would come later.