Apple Shutting Down Beats Music? Of Course; They’ll Roll It into iTunes
Several sources are reporting today that Apple is planning to shut down Beats Music. This is part of Beats that Apple acquired recently for three gazillion dollars. Is this surprising? Of course not. Apple clearly has no interest in diluting their music brand. Beats was purchased to be rolled into iTunes, and we may even see this with the release of iTunes 12, which will be part of OS X 10.10 Yosemite.
I’ve long wanted iTunes to be a streaming service, where you could stream any music that’s sold in the iTunes Store:
What I’m suggesting, in essence, is that the wall between your music library and the entire iTunes Store library be torn down, for a fee.
It would make so much sense for Apple to do this, to no longer make a difference between what’s in your music library and what’s available to stream, and, with iTunes, they could accomplish this; something that others can’t do.
There’s no reason that Beats’ “human-curated” playlists wouldn’t be a part of such a service; there’s no rocket science behind them, they just take good personnel. We’ll see in a month or so when Yosemite and iTunes 12 launch.
Update: Apple has denied these rumors. For now. It still makes more sense for the streaming service to be iTunes branded.
Then why would they add a Beats Music channel to Apple TV?
http://9to5mac.com/2014/09/17/apple-tv-september-2014-update/
Because they had to, I guess, because they still need to promote the brand, before they come out with a huge announcement about rolling it into iTunes. And, because they may be using it simply for testing purposes to see how people use it.
Makes sense for Apple to offer a hardware-only subsidiary and eliminate potential market confusion since there’s a similar Apple product out there for free.
The question is whether Apple intends to charge for the streaming service, or roll it into the benefits of iTunes Match (and possibly rename/revamp that). Or compete more directly with Spotify and Rdio and offer a freemium option.
I’ve got more than the official iTunes Match song limit and I don’t want to break up my iTunes library in order to be allowed to pay for it (even though I own TuneSpan). I’d pay $80-$100/year for (a) full access to iTunes Match for libraries under 50,000 songs, (b) commercial-free iTunes Radio and (c) Beats Music.
I don’t think a subscription service would be part of Match; it’s too cheap to pay the royalties. I think there will be a new service, with or without Match. I’d pay even more if it were access to the entire iTunes Store library. And if Match could handle my library of nearly 100K tracks.
Oh yes, adding more stuff to iTunes. That’s always a good idea! I was so looking forward to Beats becoming available in the UK. It even says on the Beats website: “You can sign up for Beats Music in the United States, with more countries coming soon. Until then, keep up with us.” With all Apple has done so far to promote the Beats brand, I’m putting this one in the “will believe it when I see it” category.
I’m sure there’s a substantial cost involved. Indeed, I’d bet most music labels would be suspicious of anyone with that many songs and make the cost prohibitively expensive to platforms like Spotify/Apple/Google if they wanted to significantly raise the limit to accommodate them.
I think Match is probably not particularly popular. I’ve asked dozens of friends with Macs if they got it and no one did (and most were unfamiliar with it!). That’s why I said revamped – I think Apple needs to scrap the service and name and have one single service and price that gives you music in the cloud (and throws yours into the cloud for your use if it’s not part of their database). Doing this would – for most people – get around any limit on owned songs. For that to work Apple would have to have iTunes Radio & Beats streaming as one part, and a choose-a-song Spotify-type feature as the other. Not sure Apple wants to go that route though….
The other option is to move away from the iTunes brand to the Beats brand – and break up the monolithic iTunes app.
The iTunes brand is too well-known for that to happen.