Beats headphones are crap, sure. And their streaming service isn't as mature as Spotify. But three billion dollars isn't about headphones or online music streaming or Dr Dre's drunken celebration. It's about growth. Apple has a chokehold on the iPod market. They've rocked the market with the iPod, iPhone, iPad and those products will be cash cows for a long time. But where is their next growth going to come from? A w…
It's interesting that Dre didn't create his music (*sampled), didn't write his lyrics and didn't come up with the idea for the headphones yet is celebrated as a genius. It was Monster's idea and then Jimmy Iovine propelled it to where it went. Dre is a quiet, private person, who rarely tours or produces new music. The idea that he is a billionaire now from putting his name on exorbitantly expensive headphones and mar…
This is a highly ignorant statement.
Sampling recorded music is in fact a very musical process, from the first 20th-century musique concrete experiments to the more modern intricate, multilayered compositions of artists like The Beastie Boys, DJ Shadow, Public Enemy, etc.
Musicians always take inspiration from other music. Build a song around a chunky 'AC/DC-style' riff. Channel Quincy Jones in the drum sound. Sampling was very important in the democratization of music production because it allowed artists without access to a studio and a host of instruments to work from a baseline of recorded sound. It quickly developed into an artform unto itself.
Yes, there was and still is a contingent of artists who sample lazily and with disregard for the original music, but Dr. Dre's productions--especially his early stuff--are full of musical reverence, high-quality engineering, and even improvements over the source material. Not to mention that after the NWA days he was increasingly bringing in session musicians to replay and reinterpret source material rather than actually sampling it digitally.
edit - And to expand a bit more on the last sentence, that is exactly what music producers do. It's only in recent years that the end-to-end musician, producer, recording engineer, mixing engineer, and mastering engineer has come into fruition. And that democratization of the recording process largely stems from technological advances like digital sampling.