"Apple, the company that turned digital music into a mainstream phenomenon" Is this guy serious?
Its bit exaggeration. But come to think of it, we could not clearly state anyone else did more impact to DIGITAL music than Apple.
Apple Confirms Its $3 Billion Deal for Beats Electronics
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Re: Apple Confirms Its $3 Billion Deal for Beats Electronics
#32An important quote from the article: >> “Could Eddy’s team have built a subscription service? Of course,” he said. “We could’ve built those 27 other things ourselves, too. You don’t build everything yourself. It’s not one thing that excites us here. It’s the people. It’s the service.” From my usage of the Beats streaming service it stands head and shoulders above everyone else because of the people it has creating pl…
Is it just the ability to discover new music that has people in love with BS?
I find that Google Play does a fantastic job on my phone, and for any sort of real use I fall back to my Sansa MP3 player. I personally dislike others making my playlists, so perhaps I'm far outside the demographic.
Is there something I'm missing here, some sort of killer feature perhaps, that validates the huge valuation of this acquisition?
Re: Apple Confirms Its $3 Billion Deal for Beats Electronics
#33Interesting that they closed the deal and announced it before the WWDC Keynote on Monday.
Someone posted a video of Dre drunk at a party confirming the deal. I'm guessing Apple is in damage control mode at this point and would have liked to announced it later.
Re: Apple Confirms Its $3 Billion Deal for Beats Electronics
#34"Apple, the company that turned digital music into a mainstream phenomenon" Is this guy serious?
What's uncontroversial about that? The iTunes Store did make (legal) digital music mainstream. That's not to say it was the first store of its kind, but it was certainly the first to have widespread success.
CDs are digital music, everyone was listening to digital music before apple did anything. People were using walkmans long before the iPod.
The point is trying to credit apple for "digital" music as opposed to "analog" music. That is just absurd. Credit them from making a business out of selling digital music, but not for making digital music popular.
Re: Apple Confirms Its $3 Billion Deal for Beats Electronics
#35The 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…
Except the majority of Beats headphones sold are much less than $450. Looking around, most of the catalog is $250 or less. Even the article says "up to $450".
Re: Apple Confirms Its $3 Billion Deal for Beats Electronics
#36Depending on the details of the deal, this may make Dr Dre hip hop's first billionaire.
he owns something like 22% of the company. I read somewhere that this will bring him to approx $800m.
So it will become rather easy for him to become a billionaire if he invests it correctly. Pretty good for a guy from the streets of Compton.
Re: Apple Confirms Its $3 Billion Deal for Beats Electronics
#37I would have never guessed that Apple's largest acquisition ever would be Beats.
Re: Apple Confirms Its $3 Billion Deal for Beats Electronics
#38"Apple, the company that turned digital music into a mainstream phenomenon" Is this guy serious?
iTunes is 64% of the digital music market and 29% of all music sold in the world. I don't see what's wrong with that statement.
Re: Apple Confirms Its $3 Billion Deal for Beats Electronics
#39The 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…
Your argument makes sense, but it kind of falls apart when you consider that Beats aren't actually good headphones, to the point where The Wirecutter actually did an article[1] where they listed all the various Beats products and then provided examples of better deals (some of them with significantly better quality at half the price).
I don't understand why Apple would buy a headphone company that makes pretty but lousy products whose price is only justified by the brand name; Apple gets that unjustified criticism already, they hardly need to reinforce it by acquiring a brand to which it actually applies.
[1] http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/faq-what-are-some-alternati...
Re: Apple Confirms Its $3 Billion Deal for Beats Electronics
#40The 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…
The numbers seem to indicate you're right, but anecdotally I've used iTunes Radio and the Beats app. Beats is a vastly superior experience. I'm excited to see Beats integrated into iTunes Radio.