Apple is planning on rebranding Beats Music, and integrating the recently purchased streaming service into iTunes, Wall Street Journal reports. The integration will supposedly happen next year, and the drop in Apple s music sales is said to be one of the major factors behind this move. Also Read - Tech giants Tesla and Apple target 2022 to build India's manufacturing story
Also Read - iPhone 13 first impressions: Sensible upgrades over iPhone 12According to the publication, music sale on iTunes was down 13-14 percent this year, compared to single digit decline last year. WSJ also cites the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, which claims global revenue from music downloads fell 2.1 percent, while revenue from ad-supported streaming services have been on a rise. Also Read - New leak again hints at a complete iPhone 14 redesign
In such a scenario, it makes little sense for Apple to pool in money into Beats Music, which only has around 250,000 registered users. Instead it can simply tap into its more than 800 million iTunes users and provide them a streaming service.
This is in line with a couple of reports that surfaced online last month. While TechCrunch initially reported that Apple was planning on shuttering Beats Music, an Apple spokesperson later told Re/code that the report was false, and Apple could instead modify or rebrand Beats Music in the future.
Apple bought Beats Electronics earlier this year for a whopping $3 billion, and in a recent interview with Charlie Rose, Tim Cook revealed the reason behind the acquisition. He pointed how Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre are off the charts creative geniuses and how they had managed to put in a human element in curating playlists. Cook said,
In Beats, what we saw was several things. We saw talent that I was super impressed with; Jimmy and Dre are off the charts creative geniuses. They also had teams underneath them that I really liked.
Jimmy has a deep knowledge of the musical industry; Dre knows artists. Dre is an artist. And they had started a subscription service. And the subscription service, well, some people think that they re all alike. Let me tell you, I went into the thing skeptically, like I should not into the acquisition, into their service, because Jimmy had told me how great it was.
One night, I m sitting playing with theirs versus some others, and all of a sudden it dawns on me that when I listen to theirs for awhile, 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 affect how you feel. It s hard to describe, but you know it when you feel it. And so that night I couldn t sleep that night. I was thinking, We ve We need to do this.
I felt that we could get a subscription service, we could get incredible talent, and that I think we could all put our heads together and do some things that are beyond what either of us are currently doing, and we could get a fast-growing business.
