281–290 of 351 posts
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What demographic is this? Beats headphones are not inexpensive
Cheaply made beats phone will happen and it'll sell more units than you can imagine. It'll have to be cheaper than the iPhone, not by much. I didn't say beats headphones were cheap now did I? Keep up.
The meat of this deal isn't likely the streaming service. Beats Music had only 111,000 subscribers as of March [1]. Compare that to Spotify's 10 million paying subscribers, 30 million non-paying users, and $4 billion valuation. The deal's financial logic is driven by Beats's $1.3 billion business (in 2013) of selling high-priced headphones. Given Apple's P/E ratio of 14.9x earnings [2], the acquisition would make sen…
Wow. Hold on. The meat of this deal is absolutely the streaming service. Apple NEEDS streaming. I buy an iPhone: I pay $100 to have ALL THE MUSIC ALL THE TIME with that phone, for the lifetime of the device. Awesome! It's like Amazon Prime but better. And Apple NEEDS that; for them to negotiate their own streaming service with the majors + merlin it would have cost them dear - probably some sort of huge advance or eq…
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2014/03/11/apple-itunes-radio-pa...
Honest question: is there a statute of limitations on what the tech world will tolerate with regards to misogynistic behavior (or bad behavior in general)? Or do people just pick and choose what they want to fight? I ask because everyone rallied behind RadiumOne's CEO being canned after he beat up his girlfriend [0]. Similar with the Mozilla CEO (granted, the offense was different ... but it's interesting to point ou…
In music we seem less able to separate the story from the artist than for other artistic mediums. Is it because many rappers maintain a public persona which is in line with that presented in the albums (even though it's not in line with the way they really are), or is it because music is still generally considered to be primarily about raw entertainment, rather than storytelling? It's interesting.
I just want to go on record with an entirely different idea as to why Apple is buying beats. They're going to make a label. Why Apple doesn't do streaming: Apple hates committing to something unless it's absolutely perfect. There are numerous examples, but NFC technology is a good one that comes to mind. Granted, they've made mistakes, like Mobile Me, but that was due to poor implementation, rather than immature tech…
Uh, yes they do, quite well in fact:
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2014/03/11/apple-itunes-radio-pa...
Already bigger than Spotify just six months after launch.
I just want to go on record with an entirely different idea as to why Apple is buying beats. They're going to make a label. Why Apple doesn't do streaming: Apple hates committing to something unless it's absolutely perfect. There are numerous examples, but NFC technology is a good one that comes to mind. Granted, they've made mistakes, like Mobile Me, but that was due to poor implementation, rather than immature tech…
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)…
The most interesting reveal from Tim Cook's quote is that he only mentions the music service and the talent, not the headphones. That's super interesting. It basically means Apple looked at this like a typical Apple aquihire / component technology purchase (of the service), that just happened to have a multi-billion dollar profitable accessories business attached to it. That makes it a very unique kind of deal.
Wild hypothesis. Amazon started as a book distributor. Now it is fighting to become a publisher. iTunes + iPod started as a music distributor. What if it now has ambitions as a label? How would one build that out of Cupertino? One would start with a fringe, fragmented genre, to serve as a beachhead. Fragmented by not flat - there should be a node near the top of a hierarchy which can be acquired and leveraged. $1.3 b…
Follow the Netflix model of owning and distributing the content.
In the long run this would cut down the power of the current labels and in turn increase profits at all these streaming services!
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The public remorse (even if feigned) matters. The internet would have forgiven Eich if he had publicly displayed regret with his donation, rather than tacitly standing behind it.
I don't agree with Eich views on marriage at all but it was refreshing to see that he DID NOT do what you suggest (which would've been a very hypocritical thing to do) and stuck to his believes.
1. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/sport/donald-sterling-admits...
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That incident was 23 years ago and he did his time for it. He's also shown remorse for it and wishes it never happened.[0] He's a 49 year old man now and he's been married for 18 years. I think he's past that kind of stuff. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btc1MflBSeQ&feature=youtu.be...
He has learned to control his public image sure, but most of his lyrics of music that he has written, performed, and produced (even presently) seems very much misogynistic. Look, we've got stories all over about the #YesAllWomen phenomenon on twitter currently. All the women asking for equality and stating that they have been sexually harassed/abused/assaulted in some way. Now in this story we have someone who holds…
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Pandora and spotify are structurally unprofitable because of their licensing problems/payments. Apple is %500Bn company-- big enough to become a label--has the marketing expertise (iTunes) and Capital ($X0Bns cash) to be a next-generation 'label'. Or maybe I'm missing something?
If Apple (or Google) had wanted to buy out the record labels and their catalogs, they could have done so years ago. They obviously didn't, probably because it's a dying industry that isn't nearly as profitable as their current products. The very idea of a 'record label' is a relic of the 20th Century, when all recorded music was distributed on heavy physical artifacts.