Apple has an incredibly strong corporate culture. That culture remained fairly constant under the black-turtlenecked tutelage of Steve Jobs. Tim Cook eased the company into his own style of leadership, and the acquisition of Beats has the chance to expand that evolution in a very positive way.
None of the streaming-music companies have a leader who built one of the most dominant labels in the past 20 years, like Iovine did. Nor do they have someone who invented a new music genre, developed the talent, and then blew it up for a commercial audience, like Dre did. That’s a massive difference between Apple and Spotify, Google, Amazon and any other tech company dipping their toe into music.
And Ian Rogers?
Beyond the gravitas of Iovine and Dre, there’s another talent coming on board in Beats Music CEO Ian Rogers, a talented digital marketer who has spent a great deal of his career figuring out how to exploit new media channels to build revenue streams for artists.
Rogers understands technology and how it can be used to help artists market to fans. From his days building the Beastie Boys’ website to his time as CEO of Topspin, he has been on the leading edge of new ways to communicate directly with fans. And there has never been a better potential platform for artists and fans to connect than streaming services.
He represents Generation Next of digital-music execs, those who understand the life cycle of artists, marketing, customer demand, and the technology that powers all these. Rogers has built a vastly different streaming service from anyone else in the space, one that has a more balanced approach between those disciplines.
I think it will be a long time until the folks outside Apple’s management team truly understand the value that Beats brings to the table.
“I think it will be a long time until the folks outside Apple’s management team truly understand the value that Beats brings to the table.”
Let’s be honest. They could’ve bought a dirty stick picked off the street for 3 billion dollars, and given enough time, various people would’ve come up with enough reasons to justify it (or reject it).
I like the theory that part of the reason this deal happened is because Apple wants to remove the headphone jack and migrate to Lightning port headphones.
They just announced such a standard for Lightning headphones during a WWDC session.
If they want to remove the headphone jack, they’d need to ensure the market follows in producing Lightning headphones, and what better way than buying the one high-end headphone maker with the top market share in the category?
That’s one possibility, but it would also build a lot of discontent with third party vendors. My thinking as to some of the motivation behind the acquisition is that Apple may want to “skip the middleman” and go directly to the artists as their own label/publishing house. Currently Apple takes a cut of anything sold in iTunes with the rest going to the label and then the label paying the royalty to the artist. Some artists are self producing and publishing on iTunes, but what if Apple went one step beyond that and said, “We’ll help you out with the high end production”? Imagine the next big hit coming out exclusively on iTunes…
I think it’s a little bit of everything. The focus is always to get Iovine on board.
With Dre, Apple now controls the power of G-Funk.
What could beat that?
Interesting theory… who’s proposing it, and what do they see it doing?
I see negatives and no serious positives from a Lightning headphone, myself.
Negatives: Zero compatibility with anything anywhere; Lightning headphones won’t work with anything else (no analog!) without a separate DAC, and nobody’s existing 1/8″ analog phones will work with it.
Can’t charge while the phones are in (which people listening at a desk do, all the time).
Positives: Er… you can build in a DAC and not use the one in the phone?
But if you wanted that, you could interrogate the headphones over the 1/8″ jack and send a digital signal over it without changing plugs, if the headphones supported it – best of both worlds.
Digital out to headphones with a DAC, or to a headphone amp, that makes sense. Removing the headphone jack and forcing Lightning connections, not so much.
First, let’s see who’s still around after the deal consumates. Second, does anyone think either Iovine or Dre are going to be spending much time at a desk in Cuptertino? Their jets may land there a lot, but the valule they bring is in the deal-making that mostly takes place in LA and Manhattan. As for their influence on Apple’s “tech culture” I have a vision problem with that, I just don’t see it happening. Even somone like Ian Rogers is not going to be talking to engineers. I bet of we look back we’ll find an article where John Maples wrote something about how much of an impact Angel Ahrendts was going to have on Apple technology.
Sure, you can come up with a protocol to send digital data over the analog jack, but I wouldn’t call it the best of both worlds.
Apple already has a digital port and that’s Lightning. Putting the circuitry in for a second one would be crazy.
They’re looking at their phones with a microscope by now in order to find extra space for the battery and so on.
Removing that pointless jack when you can use Lightning would help a lot.
I understand the inconvenience, but I’m sure they can have an elegant Lightning to headphone jack adapter for analog headphones as a stop gap measure.
Apple doesn’t neat culture import, that’s just blogger bullshit.
As for how much work Iovine and co. will do, only they know. They’re certainly obligated to do some work, at least until their stock vests (unless it gets so bad they’d walk away from it).
Influencing any culture, especially corporate culture is hard, so I agree with the BS of blogger suggestions of it. I do think that Iovine and Dre will definitely be working hard. I’m not sure how much deal-making Dre will do himself, but he’s a Hell of a brand-ambassador and the ultimate closer for the “artist” types.