“Headphone sales? Music streaming service? Wearables? Music label deals? None of the current Beats products look as a credible reason for a deal of that size. Something much bigger is going on,” Michael Vakulenko writes for VisionMobile. “It is not about what Beats is today, but about what Beats can become in the future.”
“To understand what Beats can become we need to understand Lady Gaga first. Lady-Gaga-the-business-model,” Vakulenko writes. “Troy Carter, who discovered Gaga and was her manager till November 2013 being widely credited for much of her business strategy sums it up nicely in his interview to FastCompany: ‘It was more about building a platform on top of music — because music, we realized, sells everything but music.'”
“Jimmy Iovine sees the opportunity in changing the game and ‘building a communication between a fan and an artist.’ In other words Beats Music is not yet another streaming service designed to sell music, but a platform for artists to build businesses and ‘sell everything but music’ as Troy Carter says,” Vakulenko writes. “In essence, Beats aims to become Uber of music by aggregating demand, connecting listeners to artists and empowering the artists to build thriving business on top of the platform. Much like Uber, which promises to end the era of poorly paid cab drivers. Or like Apple App Store, which connects users with app developers allowing them to build business on top of the platform. Pandora, Spotify, Play Music and Amazon that are all designed to sell music, will have very hard time to compete against a platform for building businesses on top of music.”
Read more in the full article – it’s from late May (we just saw it now) and just as valid today and highly recommended – here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Dialtone” for the heads up.]
