Beats Music
Apple is about to purchase Beats, founded by Dre, for $3.2 billion; this will be Apple's first big purchase in the mist of its competitors' spending sprees. Considering that Apple has over $158 billion in cash, this is just a drop in the bucket. Facebook offered Snapchat just under what Apple will pay for Beats, but at least Beats has making a profit. Beats has recovered from unsuccessful partnerships with HTC and HP.
With the popular wire company, Monster, Beats developed and manufactured the popular Beats Headphones. Now they have become a fashion statement and status symbol with decent music quality (well, at least much better than those Apple earbuds). They marketed their product so well in order to convince their customers to purchase $300 headphones; this was unheard of to the average consumer before Beats came into the market. With this acquisition, will Apple push Beats headphones or even stop selling competitors' headphones (e.g. Bose, Sennheiser)?
(And with the amount of compression in common music sources, headphones can only go so far to producing a great listening experience)
But Beats have become more than just headphones. Apple will also be acquiring Beats Music which is a paid subscription online music service. Apple easily dominates digital music downloads with iTunes. It all began in 2003 when iTunes was announced by Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs restated "People want to own their music" in 2007. Well, digital music downloads peaked in 2012. With services like subscription-based music services like Spotify and Google Music All-Access, Apple is now playing catch up. It seems that Jobs was wrong about people wanting to own their music; the convenience of streaming anything you want without any syncing changed the music industry. Apple attempted to catch up to Pandora and other music-recommendation services with iTunes Radio but they certainly have lost that battle. So will Apple rebrand Beats Music into iTunes or endorse Beats Music in their products in order to compete with Spotify and Google Music All-Access?
The next push in music will be producing a better music experience with less compression. With efforts like Pono Music and the voice of audiophiles, high quality music will (hopefully) be made commonly available in the near future. Speaking of audiophiles, I find it hard to imagine that Apple will integrate the Beats brand into the Apple brand because of the Apple consumers (including audiophiles) that criticize the Beats brand.