The amount of people in this thread who are unable to understand the brilliance of this deal is astounding.
What they bought is not one thing, but all the components that came together in the right way, at the right time.
* Beats Music, a music service that is truly different from the others and is in my opinion better in many ways.
* Legendary founder of Interscope records Jimmy Iovine (who then ran it for 25 years) as part of Apple management.
* Dr. Dre, enough said.
* The amazing people behind the curation of the playlists on Beats Music.
* A powerful brand, though this part is still a grey area for me. It remains to be seen how they handle the brand.
* A strong command of the market. In 2012, NPD Group reported that Beats had a market share of 64% in the U.S for headphones priced higher than $100. It's likely even higher now.
* Hardware that's flying off the shelves as noted above. They have the opportunity to improve the engineering of this hardware to make a truly great product while retaining the amazing branding.
All of those things came together into one place in one deal. It's incredibly smart.
Apple made 170 Billion dollars last year. They are insane not to try to spend chump change on the music industry. The own the delivery of sound from that industry INTO a vast % of the consumers of it.
Apple is going to own the entire experience of media consumption for some % of their customer base.
They will be the label, the distribution, the hardware and the content. A 100% apple audio feed, all wrapped up in a tight little box tied directly to your bank account. Every click costs you something.
Exactly. You're absolutely right. They will try to control the flow right from the time artists make the sounds to the time the audio hits the listener's ear.
Just as they control an app from the time it's written to the time the user uses the app on their phone (while taking a nice 30% cut of proceeds).
What they bought is not one thing, but all the components that came together in the right way, at the right time.
* Beats Music, a music service that is truly different from the others and is in my opinion better in many ways.
* Legendary founder of Interscope records Jimmy Iovine (who then ran it for 25 years) as part of Apple management.
* Dr. Dre, enough said.
* The amazing people behind the curation of the playlists on Beats Music.
* A powerful brand, though this part is still a grey area for me. It remains to be seen how they handle the brand.
* A strong command of the market. In 2012, NPD Group reported that Beats had a market share of 64% in the U.S for headphones priced higher than $100. It's likely even higher now.
* Hardware that's flying off the shelves as noted above. They have the opportunity to improve the engineering of this hardware to make a truly great product while retaining the amazing branding.
All of those things came together into one place in one deal. It's incredibly smart.