The entire blogosphere (if such a thing still exists) has been using Soundcloud to embed music on their blogs for years. Before Soundcloud, blogs would simply host music on third party sites like MediaFire (remember them?), which ironically went up in fire due this shady enterprise a few years ago after undergoing pressure from major labels and rights holders to stop hosting illegal music.

Since then, Soundcloud has been the number one source of music for 99% of music blogs, but there’s always been one issue with this model: at no point does an artist get their music paid for. They might get bookings, or more music-related work, and possibly sell music off the back of their Soundcloud embeds, but they don’t actually profit from the actual stream itself.

Beatport looks like it be on the way to cracking this paradigm, from today any music taken from their newly launched streaming service can be embedded by blogs (like us), fans, labels, anyone. What makes this unique is these streams will be paid for, that’s right, musicians will actually make money from this enterprise. The details are still thin on the ground, like how much they might actually make – but just imagine if all blogs decided to post the majority of their music from Beatport instead of Soundcloud. Given time, it could become the defacto way to post music openly, to the benefit of artists.

“Supporting artists has been a core value at Beatport since day one, and that mission remains as we expand to serving fans with our new streaming service,” said Beatport Executive Creative Director Clark Warner.

“Our embeddable streaming music player not only helps artists promote their music by making it available wherever their fans live online, but we are also taking the necessary steps to pay rightsholders for each listen so artists get paid,” explained Warner.

Soundcloud is also planning to monetise their service, but from what’s been said, and shown, embedded tracks wouldn’t generate any income, in fact Soundcloud is intent on feeding sponsored sounds into users’ feeds, which might work, but seems like quite a narrow approach to monetising millions of users. Why not place an ad before every other stream in a similar way to Youtube or to a lesser extent Spotify?

So here goes, we’re going to post a few tracks from Beatport to see what they look like, how the player performs on different devices, and whether they are picked up by Hype Machine. There are other issues too, it looks like Beatport’s streaming service and Beatport Pro, which actually sells music, share widely differing catalogues, which means at the moment we don’t have a great deal to choose from, so bare with us, but this might well be the future given time – so please give it a chance.