“Apple CEO Tim Cook looked like he wanted to dance Wednesday as he discussed his company’s $3 billion acquisition of Beats Electronics,” Michael Liedtke reports for The Associated Press. “Cook seems most excited about the potential of Beat’s still nascent music-streaming service, which currently has more than 250,000 subscribers. That’s paltry compared to the more than 10 million people subscribing to Spotify’s rival streaming service, Cook is confident that will change once Beats has access to the data that Apple Inc. has accumulated while selling more than 35 billion songs to more than 800 million iTunes accounts during the past 13 years.”
“‘We are getting the first music subscription service that got it right, that believes in human curation,’ Cook said during a Wednesday interview at Apple’s Cupertino, California headquarters. ‘We think this is killer. The feeling that you get from listening to this service is so different than anything else,'” Liedtke reports. “After generating $1.1 billion in revenue last year, Beats’ sales increased by 30 percent during the first three months this year, Cook said. He expects Beat to boost Apple’s earnings beginning in October. Apple earned $37 billion on revenue of $171 billion in its last fiscal year, so Beats’ initial contribution won’t be that significant financially.”
“Cook says he tries not to ever consider what Steve Jobs might have done if he were still alive, but he insists that his predecessor wasn’t as resistant to acquisition as most people think,” Liedtke reports. “‘We have never been anti-acquisition,’ Cook said. ‘We have looked at some very, very large companies and we decided not to buy them. But we didn’t decide not to do them out of religious reasons. There was no rule, ‘Thou Shalt Not Acquire.’ There was no rule that everything had to be built organically.’ … Jobs ‘knew Jimmy very well and he loved Jimmy very much,’ Cook said.”
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MacDailyNews Take: Figuratively, not literally.
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