Dr. Dre has already made hundreds of millions selling headphones but apparently that’s not enough. Dre now has his eyes set on the music streaming business as he gets ready to launch “Beats Music” which will be a direct competitor to services like Spotify and Rdio. As reported by techcrunch.com:
“The new Beats Music streaming music service will launch January 2014, according to CEO Ian Rogers. The service also launched a ‘name claiming’ site today that lets you snag a primo username early.
The project has been in private alpha for a while under the code-name Project Daisy, and has been garnering some heated attention.”
Beats Music seems like a cool spin off for Dr. Dre and the Beats crew. However, they are entering an extremely competitive space, and will have to come with some really cool benefits to lure customers over to the service. As also reported by techcrunch.com:
“Beats Music shoulders into a crowded field, which includes iTunes Radio from Apple, Google All Access Music from you know who and the popular players like Rdio and Spotify. Some details from GigaOm back in August reveal that the core experience will be centered around curated playlists created by musicians and music writers.
What we’ve heard is that there may also be an additional hook to the Beats Music service. Specifically, they have at one point worked on a feature that would allow you to listen along to whatever a celeb was currently playing on the service. Imagine if Trent Reznor’s iPod could become a sort of ‘Turntable.fm’ room that allowed you to peek into what he was playing now. Think ‘Rdio in real-time’.”
That sounds like a cool feature, but not nearly enough of an advantage for someone to switch. There are some other potential add ons that could make Beats Music compelling. Beats headphones were originally positioned to provide the best sound quality on headphones. If the Beats team could execute the same thing for digital streaming that would be a major plus.
Music availability is also still a major flaw in most streaming services, especially for rap, where there’s a large amount of mixtape content. If Beats Music could find a way to offer more content, that would also give them one up on the competition.
Lastly, Beats could use the Beats Music service as a loss leader to sell more headphones. They could offer the Beats Music service free to all new customers that buy a pair headphones.
If the Beats Music team is able execute all of these things then they will have a compelling offer that could revolutionize the music streaming market.
