If your bullshit detectors were going off yesterday as the news broke that Apple was axing their newly-acquired Beats music streaming service, give yourself a pat on the back. The cool-tech giant isn’t planning to shutter the service it had just spent $3 billion to purchase, contrary to a report by TechCrunch earlier this week.
Apple purchased the Beats By Dre headphone line and Beats Music service back in May, establishing Dr. Dre as the wealthiest man in the history of Hip-Hop. According to Apple PR rep Tom Neumayr, the TechCrunch story is “not true,” but wouldn’t further elaborate.
Apple’s Tim Cook recently explained why they wanted Beats in the first place:
“One night, I’m sitting playing with theirs versus some others. And all of a sudden, it dawns on me that when I listened to theirs for a while, I feel completely different. And the reason is that they recognized that human curation was important in the subscription service, that the sequencing of songs that you listen to affects how you feel. I think they’ve done a fabulous job with their brand. It’s hard to describe. But you know it when you feel it. And so, that night, I couldn’t sleep that night. And so, I was thinking, ‘We’ve — we need to do this.’”
In all likelihood, Apple is still trying to figure out how to best incorporate the Beats brand into their own iTunes Radio, and take most advantage of a subscription service could potentially compete with Spotify or Pandora’s user base. In the meantime, we’ll probably have to give them a bit as they count their warehouses of cash after the release of the iPhone 6 last week, and deal with the backlash from people freaking out over the phones bending in their pockets.
As for those Beats By Dre headphones, yeah they’re still overpriced hunks of sonic ignorance. If you’re in the mood to spend a couple hundred bucks on some flashy headphones, make sure there’s an accompanying level of quality that’s worth the cash – like Samsung’s Level Over cans, which we recently profiled in our Soundcheck series.
