I found music forums, in general, are not as popular because of the reasons you mentioned regarding social media nevermind DJ forums or more niche Trance forum. If you set up another one that covered all genres then it may do much better. A Trance forum would not attract Techno, House, etc and so limits the memberbase.
I gave up with running a music website altogether as they don't make much at all. Instead, I got into the Web hosting industry and been doing that for nearly 9 years now and it actually makes me money haha. I had so many downloaded tracks at Beaport.com like about 900 MP3s at 320Kbps and lost them all to a failed HDD and beatport.com wouldn't let me redownload them :( That put me off mixing altogether at the time but was probably a blessing in disguise :D I still love downloading and listening to mixes of course.
Yes, Lazarus seems to be doing very well. Fair play! You're right about DJX2. There were loads of others from DJSource but I forgot a lot of the names, oh DJ Blackcat too. The domain djsource.co.uk is going for 500 GBP but pointless without the database of email addresses so can email them all to try to get them to rejoin the forum. If I had the email list I probably would have tried it myself but you are more clued up on music/running a site than me ;-)
Yeah, DJPassion.co.uk had everything: mix uploads, radio station, forums and was doing well until that issue happened. I redirected that domain to forums.hosting and setup https://forums.hosting/forum/other-forums/fh-community-groups/music-group
As you can see that is dead too. Social killed a lot of sites off like Amazon are killing retail shops in high streets :o
Anyhow, will be downloading the other mixes!
PS you still in Coventry? I lived there for a year and a half until February last year just as they won UK City of Culture which website I built to help promote the bid ;-)
PPS if anyone who works at Beatport.com is here and can help me get all my MP3s back... it would be great to hear from you ;-p
Keep the mixes coming mate. The style is quality... the previous mix started with emotional epicness/classic (Kevin & Perry haha) --> followed by lots of bangers and more emotional epicness - love it!!! :D