The download store is dying. A Bristol startup wants to be what comes next.
With Juno Download's abrupt exit, tens of thousands of DJs have lost the shop they bought their music from. Dubrate opens in public beta this week with a blunt pitch: 85% to the artist, always.
For the better part of two decades, if you were a DJ who bought music to play out, you had a routine. New-release day, open the store, dig, fill the cart, sync the USB. For a huge share of the scene, that store was Juno Download — the download counter that outlived the record shop, the one that survived when the high-street chains didn't.
What happened to Juno Download?
Now it's gone. On 1 June 2026 Juno Download ceased trading with immediate effect, twenty years after it launched, with no advance warning — its socials deleted the same day and its homepage reduced to a short farewell: 'the time has come to say goodbye.' COO Lucas Garcia's explanation to the trade press was blunter: with streaming now the default and labels going direct-to-fan, 'the role of the music webstore is becoming less significant.' Existing customers can still re-download what they bought, and the Juno Records vinyl shop trades on. But for the working DJ, the question underneath the nostalgia is a practical one: where do I buy my music now?
Where do DJs buy music now?
The honest answer is that the options got narrower. Juno's own farewell pointed the orphaned at Beatport and Traxsource, and Beatport in particular is where most carts have moved — along with the familiar gripes about paying extra for lossless. Bandcamp holds the direct-to-fan corner, and smaller stores are courting the diggers. But the platforms left standing were never built for the person behind the decks at 2am. They take 30 to 40 percent of every sale. The tools a DJ actually needs — key matching, proper crate prep, a clean export to a USB stick — sit buried under playlists and algorithms designed for streaming. And the artist, the person who made the record you're about to drop, sees a shrinking slice of a shrinking pie.
Into that gap steps Dubrate, a DJ-first download store for electronic music built in Bristol, opening to the public in beta this week.
85% to the artist, always
The pitch is deliberately un-clever. Eighty-five percent of every sale goes to the artist. Not an introductory rate, not a tier you unlock — the standard. Payouts land straight in the artist's bank via Stripe. No exclusivity, no listing fees, and artists keep their masters. And because subscription downloads pay artists the same 85% as an outright sale, the same catalogue earns twice.
'Juno closing isn't a surprise, it's a warning,' says George, Dubrate's founder. 'The whole model of squeezing the middle — taking a third off the top while giving the artist less and the DJ a worse experience every year — was always going to end somewhere. We're not trying to be the next big platform. We're trying to build the shop the scene actually wanted: the artist gets paid properly, and the DJ gets a tool built for the job.'
Built for the booth, not the feed
Where the incumbents point at streaming, Dubrate points at the booth. Tracks are coded by Camelot key for harmonic mixing. Crates export clean to Rekordbox, Serato, M3U and straight to a USB stick for standalone CDJs. A harmonic 'build a set' tool walks you a mixable order from a single starting track. It reads less like a streaming service and more like the store a DJ would design if anyone had bothered to ask one.
The giveaway that grows a following
For artists, there's a twist the old stores never offered: the follow-to-unlock free download. An artist can give a track away, but the download unlocks when a fan follows them — on Dubrate, and on the platforms the artist chooses. Instead of a giveaway leaking into the void, every free download hands the artist a new follower.
What's live in the beta
The beta is open now at dubrate.co.uk. DJs can browse the catalogue, build crates and prep sets today, with purchasing switching on as the beta rolls out; artists and labels can sign up and list their catalogue now. It's early, it's rough in places, and the team is upfront about that — it's a beta, run by a small team who answer their own email.
But the timing is hard to argue with. The download store spent twenty years being treated as a relic — right up until the biggest one closed and everyone remembered they still needed somewhere to buy the music. Someone was always going to try to build what comes next. It might as well be the one that pays the artist properly.