Recent Apple news revealed by Financial Times speak about Apple’s plans to include the paid – for Beats music service into future versions of iOS starting early next year. Anonymous sources familiar with the matter also stated that Apple intended to embed the Beats music service into iPhones and iPads, while trying to make the streaming service cheaper.
Apple purchased Beats Music in May this year for the fabulous sum of $3 billion. Since then, Apple is working hard to establish a powerful position in the ever – growing market of music streaming. Free access to music represents a very hot debate of our times, and record labels and artists show frustration towards the likes of YouTube and Spotify.
While people are still willing to pay to listen to music, the free access to humongous amounts of tunes negatively balanced the market and the music industry is rather concerned. In this context, Apple is going through serious negotiations with record labels in order to push down the monthly subscription from $10 to only $5.
As you can imagine, labels executives didn’t jump in happiness when hearing this proposal, asking Apple for slightly higher sums. On the other hand, a $10 music monthly subscription is way too much to ask from a regular music listener, given that the average customer’s annual spending on music doesn’t go beyond $55 – $60.
The recent release of the newest iOS version lacked Beats music service and the omission was heavily noticed by iOS 8 customers. Now Apple intends to deliver the service to every future iPhone and iPad on the planet, in an effort to keep its hundreds of millions of mobile device customers loyal to the company.
Moreover, Apple is pushing hard towards subscription music because the downloads from iTunes are slowly (but steadily) declining. It was about time Apple started capitalizing on the company it bought from Dr Dre and Jimmy Iovine, although specialists assume the service will be branded under the iTunes name, and not under the Beats one.
From the looks of it, the future Beats music service powered by Apple will have strong competitors like Soundcloud, Spotify and Pandora. Apple may also meet Google in this battle for music streaming services supremacy. Last week, Google announced the release of a new YouTube service, the YouTube Music Key, a brand new paid monthly music subscription service.
We don’t know for sure when the Beats service music is going to be officially released, but Financial Times reported it to become alive sometime in March 2015. Analysts are keeping their eyes open, as the music streaming competition appears to be as stronger as ever.