I appreciate Beatport, but the site is incredibly slow and buggy especially when you are trying to quickly browse songs by relatively famous artists. Like caching, indexing, have y’all heard of it? Discogs is loads faster even with obscure artists.
The experience leaves much to be desired. How does one create a Beatport like website? IE how do I get artists/labels to legally upload their music? I’m genuinely curious if anyone knows the legalities behind the scenes? Bandcamp is nice, but it feels a little immature.
Please feel free to DM me, I have some experience in and around this space. (though not directly with dance music licensing specifically).
A few thoughts:
Legal details will be on a per-country basis, and possibly a per-state or per-province basis. But before you hire an expensive lawyer, look up people who have done business development (often abbreviated BD or BizDev) and try to get a zoom / coffee meeting with them. They can give you practical insights into the process around creating and inking the contracts you need.
Read The Long Tail. It is over a decade old, but still essential reading if you want to understand how digital media works as a business from a selection perspective.
My experience is in building the IT systems that manage metadata about retail e-commerce products. Unfortunately, the search/browse problem you identify is always going to be a problem. With limited compute resources, you will always end up prioritizing the stuff that customers most want to see and is most likely to sell. Caches are fast for frequently accessed things and actually slow things down slightly (or a lot, depending) for the less frequently accessed stuff.
One possibly solution is to build a service that focuses on a narrow vertical market. Beatport sells music that Amazon and Apple can’t be bothered to sell. You may be able to sell music that Beatport can’t be bothered to sell. People with spare $billions floating around generally like to hear that you intend to conquer the world rather than mine a narrow niche.
Finally, if you want to work near music but your ultimate goal is to make a big pile of cash, then burnish your resume and work your butt off to get an interview at Amazon, Apple, Sirius XM or another established big player. It won’t be easy to get the job, and it won’t be easy to do the work, but both will be easier than launching and fundraising your own service. (If you laughed at that warning, you are probably crazy. But are you the right kind of crazy?)