Just last month, Apple officially acquired Dr. Dre’s and Jimmy Iovine’s streaming music service Beats Music. The $3 billion deal, first announced in May, was a highly publicized event, mostly due to the music industry power players involved: Apple, the tech giant; Dr. Dre the rapper and headphone company owner; and Iovine, cofounder of Interscope Records. Since the announcement of the deal, the Beats Music app has been downloaded 5 million times and has a quarter of a million paying subscribers. However, this past week, TechCrunch reported that several sources claimed that Apple was about to shut down the streaming music service. These sources pointed out that the Beats Music app didn’t come pre-installed on the iPhone 6 or 6 Plus and the service has barely been mentioned by Apple at major press events. Thankfully, Apple has stated that these reports are false. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, recently praised the service, pointing out that the “human curation” aspect of Beats Music sets it apart from competitors. While it doesn’t seem that the future of Beats Music is entirely clear, based on this information, it wouldn’t be hard to fathom Apple removing the Beats branding from the service and incorporating the guts of the streaming player into its existing services or an entirely new, Apple-branded service.
