“Apple bought Beats, but it isn’t buying headphones and it isn’t buying a streaming music service,” Michael Comeau writes for Minyanville. “It’s buying cultural authority.”
“Apple wants to create the next MTV, with Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine leading the charge,” Comeau writes. “I’m not talking about the modern reality-TV machine MTV. I’m talking about the original MTV that reinvigorated the music business in the 1980s while serving as the premier pop-culture tastemaker.”
“The surging popularity of Beats headphones basically ensures that the $3 billion Apple is spending doesn’t go down the drain, so perhaps the thinking is, ‘Let’s take the Beats Music mentality and scale it.’ And why not? The download model is on the decline no matter what,” Comeau writes. “Beats Music by nature has trouble scaling because it has no free component beyond a seven-day free trial — but that’s where iTunes Radio comes in… I see Apple/Beats functioning as more of a creative/curatorial force than a technological one. Time will tell if it’s the best way forward, but I do know one thing: What the world doesn’t need is just another music streaming service. It needs a new MTV.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Arline M.” for the heads up.]