Beats to Launch Music-Streaming Service, Surprisingly Called Beats Music
posted Sunday Dec 8, 2013 by Nicholas DiMeo
Beats, arguably the most popular high-end headphone in the market today, is moving into the music-streaming service to compete with Pandora, Spotify and more. Jimmy Iovine, the company's co-founder and head of Interscope/Geffen Records, dove into details this week about Beats' decision to enter a new space.
In keeping with its easy naming system, the headphones, digital audio hardware technology, and now the music-streaming service will be called Beats Music. Iovine said that the way Beats is going to differentiate itself from the competition is by putting all its effort into hand-curated lists for all types of scenarios, moods and times of day.
We are making tons and tons of curated lists. If you go the gym, we'll know where you are. So when you wake up in the morning, there will be a list waiting for you.
According to the chairman and co-founder, Beats Music, codenamed Daisy, currently has over 100 professionals putting together playlists for every possible occasions they can come up with. Of the team working on the unique take on music streaming, only one of them is famous: Trent Reznor. The former 9 Inch Nails vocalist has been signed on to oversee Beats Music's curation process. Iovine also said that subscribers would be able to set up personalized playlists using a proprietary algorithm that Beats created for the service.
When asked about pricing, he interestingly responded by saying Beats Music would "charge the same thing as everybody else... $10 a month or whatever it is." Good to know that he has a firm grip on the competitors in the market space and their pricing.
Beats Music comes after the Beats picked up music-streaming service MOG last year for $10 million. Marking it as a "failed utility" but with promise, Iovine added,
The infrastructure and technology were great. It's hard to hire 50 good engineers. We were able to retain 99% of them.
There's one last caveat to add here. Beats Music should also be better for the artists whose songs are on the platform. The service will be able to give better information and access on who is listening to an artist's music. Described as "fair play," Beats Music will tell an artist how many times a song has been played, under what playlists, how it compares to other songs in its space and more. That's definitely an added bonus in a world where iTunes gives you almost no information on the demographic listening to music.