Apple just made the Beats deal official, announcing its plans to acquire both Beats Music and Beats Electronics for $3 billion. Apple CEO Tim Cook has conducted several interviews with various news organisations about the deal, revealing some interesting tidbits. The press release noted that Apple will keep Beats around as a separate brand, including Beats’ hardware. Most notably, however, Cook told the Financial Times that Apple will not remove the Beats app from competing app stores on Android and Windows Phone. Cook said “It’s all about the music”.
The Financial Times also confirmed that Apple will keep Beats’ subscription service and iTunes Radio separate entities, at least for the time being. In an interview with the New York Times, Cook sung the praises of Iovine and Dre saying that these people are unique. He continued that Dre and Iovine, who will join Apple as employees, are going to focus on making “features that blow your mind” to take music “to an even higher level than it is now”.
Beats Music will still be available on Android and Windows Phone after the deal, @Tim_Cook tells @FT. “It’s all about music.” Story @FT soon
— Tim Bradshaw (@tim) May 28, 2014
The Apple-Beats acquisition has been met with a lot of skepticism in recent weeks. Unsurprisingly, Cook is positively enthused about the whole thing.
Cook showed similar enthusiasm in an internal memo to Apple employees. Cook said that Beats is the first company to do a music subscription service “right”. Beats will help Apple expand its editorial and curation teams for music as well as push the iTunes business forward, according to the note.
Mr. Cook called the deal a “no-brainer.” He said that Apple had bought 27 companies since last year, but that did not mean Apple had to buy those companies.
“Could Eddy’s team have built a subscription service? Of course,” he said. “We could’ve built those 27 other things ourselves, too. You don’t build everything yourself. It’s not one thing that excites us here. It’s the people. It’s the service.”
The Wall Street Journal shines some more light on the duo’s new jobs, saying that whilst Iovine will leave his current role to join full-time at Apple, Dre will remain primarily creating music. The artist will “do as much as it takes” for Apple, however.