At Output Conference in Belfast, Inflyte’s Paul Hamill hosted a panel following a dance record’s journey from first discovery to the wider market. He was joined by Helen Sartory (Beatport), Luke McFarlane (Material Music) and Dominic Kerley (LabelWorx).
Dance music has always worked differently from other genres. Records reach DJs, radio and tastemakers before the public hears them, clubs act as a real-world testing ground, and a track can build cultural value long before streaming numbers show it. The panel followed that journey stage by stage, and a few themes kept coming up.
Data is helping labels decide what to lead with
The traditional route of emailing a demo to a label and waiting for a reply is no longer the only way music gets signed. The panel agreed that artists now have more ways to test their music and take some control. Some artists road-test tracks as unlabelled IDs, with no name or backstory attached, to get honest reactions. Labels are using live signals too.
Dominic described labels with five or ten tracks ready to go and no clear opener:
“They’re seeing which records are getting the most hype, and that’s what’s determining the schedule.”
He added that “the tools are there to make it easier now”. Where artists once “just had to send it out to the label and hope for the best”, they can now build evidence of traction themselves via social media or early DJ promo sendouts.
Artist relationships are looser than in pop
Luke explained why the dance model suits artists who want flexibility. Material works with some artists over the long term and others for a single release or EP, and artists often move between labels depending on the sound they’re after. He contrasted this with pop’s multi-year, multi-release commitments. Dance music’s structure, he suggested, is better set up for artists who want to move around and try different labels.
Release week is losing its grip
Luke said the traditional pre-save and pre-order campaign still exists, but no longer does what it used to, “because people want things now”. The panel’s focus was on what happens after release. Once a track is out, distributors and labels look for what’s gaining traction, then build support around it, including playlist pitching and seeding campaigns through third-party promoters. The idea of a short release window is giving way to a longer lifecycle in which a track can take off months or years later.
Beatport: DJs want to do some of the work themselves
Helen explained why Beatport approaches discovery differently from mainstream streaming platforms:
“Our target user base are DJs. They’re very active, engaged listeners. It’s not the same as discovery on Spotify or Apple, which tends to be more lean-back and algorithmically led.”
DJs, she said, “want to feel like they’ve done some of the work themselves in finding a record”. They don’t want to be spoon-fed. Beatport’s approach rests on human curation as well as algorithms:
“All of our curation is still human curation. We have a team of 35 curators around the world.”
She said those curators rarely look at follower counts. They ask whether there is a story behind a track and whether it’s part of a bigger arc, but the decision always comes back to the music.
Track ID and the signal problem in the club
Dance music is hard to measure because so much of its life happens in clubs. Helen discussed how Track ID, Beatport’s music recognition tool built with a partner specialising in club environments, could turn those moments into data. The culture has shifted too. A few years ago DJs kept track IDs secret. Now many see promoting the music they play as part of the job, and the comments under every viral club clip ask what the track is.
Helen said that data could eventually feed back to labels as an upstream signal, capturing momentum before streaming catches up. It could also help fix a long-standing gap in performance royalties, which are notoriously hard to attribute in club play. Linking Beatport’s data with other recognition systems could, she said, create accurate performance royalty data sources, which “would be a big win for the industry”.
Metadata still matters, and genre tagging is a hard problem
The practical advice from Dominic was to keep metadata consistent. He stressed that ISRC codes must be tagged properly and warned against reusing the same code across different versions of a track. Inflyte offers adding an ISRC as part of your release, so that airplay can be tracked accurately later on. Helen said Beatport is using AI to classify genres from the audio itself, which matters when a catalogue has dozens of sub-genres and tagging should be “led by sound”. She also warned that delivering music under a bigger genre in the hope of charting doesn’t work. What matters is that DJs can find the record where they expect it.
AI: a production tool, not a replacement
The panel closed on AI. There was no appetite for fully AI-generated music. As a production tool, one panellist said, it’s “okay to a level”, but:
“Ultimately I think people still want human music. They want that connection with artists, and they want to see them play live.”
Helen said Beatport’s policy was led by community feedback, after a survey in which users said “very loudly” what they didn’t want. The test she described is creative intent: whether there is significant human creative intent in the piece of music.
The takeaway
The panel’s answer to “who decides what breaks?” was that data is useful and human judgement still leads. Labels are using live reactions and DJ support to decide which record to lead with, artists can build their own evidence of traction before anyone signs them, and tools like Track ID may soon turn club moments into data that reaches labels earlier than streaming numbers can. But none of that replaces the people making the calls. Beatport’s curators still choose by the music rather than follower counts, DJs still want to find records themselves, and crowds still give the most trustworthy verdict of all.
The same went for AI, it can be useful as a production tool and for organising a huge catalogue, but the panel felt audiences still want a human behind the music and a connection with the artist. DJs, curators, labels and crowds remain the trusted filters, and in a world of near-infinite music that trust looks more valuable, not less. For artists and labels, the practical lesson is to use the data available to build momentum, keep the metadata clean, and put the music in front of the right people early using social media and DJ promo tools.