Beatport has sparked controversy for its genre category tags in recent years, but their latest change is a no-brainer. The online music marketplace has incorporated three new tags into its interface: “Leftfield bass,” “trap/future bass” and “garage/bassline/grime.”

The addition will round out Beatport’s categorization of bass music genres, which up until now only consisted of the 2010 addition “dubstep.” “Leftfield bass” will be further broken down into the subgenres “deep dubstep” and “juke/footwork,” and the existing category of “drum & bass” will be given the subgenre tag “half time.”

In a statement, Beatport General Manager Terry Weerasinghe said

We 100% recognise that we are really late to the game introducing these genres. But we have been working hard with key labels, artists and press from the bass community to build the best possible experience for DJs. We can’t make up for not having huge genres like trap properly curated on the store five years ago. However, we have now assembled a team dedicated to our bass genres, which means we can promote more bass artists and labels by giving them features like an international sales chart, profiled DJ top 10s and regular artist and label spotlights, plus targeted social support and cross-promotion to our other key genres and global fan bases.

About a year ago, Beatport had incorporated the genre tags “future house,” “dance” and “big room” into its platform. The latter change had been made in an effort to readopt the classic definition of “progressive house,” but the decision elicited backlash as artists like deadmau5, Feed Me and Wolfgang Gartner had been recategorized as “big room” without their knowing.

As of the 2017 IMS Business Report, “techno,” “tech house” and “house” remain the top-selling genres on Beatport, in that order.

Source: Resident Advisor