What happened to Beats by Dre?

so it is very likely that if you clicked on this video you remember that beets when I was a child were everywhere, on every street, on every corner, in every cafe, you couldn't leave the house without seeing beets, and even for the people who couldn't pay them. Like me, just the promise of fake

beats

was tempting, so

what

happened

? How is it possible that in 10 years

beats

went from being the brand of people's dreams to this secondary company that silently releases a new product from time to time? Well, beats had an incredible In the beginning, the face of the company was an American rapper named Dr.

Dre and one day he looked at Apple and realized, hey, wait a second. This company sells 400 iPods with one-dollar headphones. He didn't like these headphones, as far as Dre was concerned. The only thing they were good enough to do was check that your sound was working. This was a two-sided coin for him because, on the one hand, he took it as an insult. You know, he's in a studio all day. Night was just pouring love into his songs to make them sound good but no one could appreciate it but on the other hand he saw this as a golden opportunity so he took advantage of it, he and his business partner built a pair of headphones to fill this gap and because to how they took advantage of all their celebrity contacts, from the first product the beats just flew, before they even released their first headphones they sent 15 pairs to lebron james the world famous basketball player, turns out these headphones ended up on heads. of every member of the 2008 US Olympic team, that's maximum exposure and it's actually better than paying for ads because instead of people rolling their eyes or trying to fast-forward , this was the equivalent of people's childhood heroes telling them, "Hey, buy these headphones." more like me and it wasn't just basketball players, they gave nicki minaj an exclusive set of pink headphones.

They sent Lil Wayne personalized ones encrusted with diamonds, they incorporated Justin Bieber. Lady Gaga had her own pair of headphones made after she and David Guetta had theirs. own headphones made after him and here's the smart part: the beats absolutely made sure that these guys got their headphones right before they went on tour, performed or made a music video because they knew damn well that our headphones look cool and these The guys will get some custom headphones made for them, of course they'll want to show them off, but here's the thing. The Beats were never the best sounding headphones.

They were never the best quality headphones. They definitely weren't value for money, but

what

they did right was target a market that no one else had targeted before realizing that, until then, premium headphones were considered simply an enthusiast tool, this endless series of boring black and gray devices that were only made for professionals, but through association. with great people and by giving customers so many fun colors and designs to choose from, they created a premium headset that everyone wanted, even if it was just to complement an outfit, now the other stroke of genius was the simple fact that the score was settled to exaggerate. bass, which is the main thing that those dollar Apple headphones were missing and so for all those users, the people who jumped from those to these people who never tried the proper beats of the high-end headphones really sounded incredible in comparison, and so too.

That aspirational effect of watching your childhood heroes on TV use beets and loving them so there was also the side effect of consumers recommending beets to other consumers and so, in just a few years, beets achieved get 70% premium headphones. market, I repeat 70 percent by selling headphones that cost only 20 so you know what else costs 20 to make, huh. Conference and they were just getting started, then they worked with hp to integrate beats audio into laptops and htc to integrate it into phones. They were building their own music subscription service, which is exactly the future we've moved to now, how do you go wrong from there?

Well, in 2014, Apple bought Beets and although it didn't really seem like it at the time, this was At first glance, this was one of the strangest acquisitions of the decade, why would Apple of all companies spend so much money? This was their biggest acquisition, by the way, in a brand of early fashion headphones that were mocked by anyone who really cared about sound. Apple is being criticized left, right and center for this acquisition, but let me ask you a question: which company do you think is the biggest seller of headphones right now? It doesn't beat Apple and this acquisition is an important part. of why Apple knew full well in 2014 that wireless headphones were about to explode, they saw this content boom coming, the fact that it seems almost every person on the planet now uses their smartphone to listen to music or podcasts or watch Netflix shows, etc.

They preemptively realized how important a good pair of wireless headphones was going to be, but they didn't want everyone using Beats headphones. They want everyone to use Apple headphones, so you can probably see where I'm going with this when Apple bought beats, they had no intention of collaborating with them, making joint products or actually using the beats brand for anything. Apple I think from the beginning Apple bought beats with the intention of dissecting them and basically using all the resources they had. They could come together to power Apple products and that's basically what

happened

. Apple pretty much looted their audio engineers, their talent, their ideas, their technologies and used them to make airpods, airpods pro, homepods and most recently airpods max, they still sell beats, you can go to the official Apple. store, go to the music section and find Beats products and Apple has equipped those Beats products with chips made by Apple so that they work great with iPhones because why doesn't the Beads brand still have value?

Then Apple could also continue manufacturing. take advantage of it, but you'll notice that while they haven't eliminated it, it really seems like they're letting the Beats brand die. Apple is reinvesting very little in the long-term future of Beets, and while they have released some new Beats products, if you look a little closer, you'll see that they've only updated ones that don't compete with Apple's, as if Apple doesn't would have upgraded the Beats Pro at all because they knew full well that they were going to release their own pro headphones. They pretty much let the Beats pill rot and scrapped the smart speaker Beats was working on too because Apple needs as little competition as possible in the speaker market.

The two main products they have kept are the sports-focused Power Beats and the fashion-focused ones. over-the-ear headphones and that's only because right now Apple doesn't have one of its own products to fill those gaps, but you can bet your bottom dollar that beat-making minutes are already available now that you've heard of Apple Music, right? Music streaming service with monthly subscription and budget. Well, I'll give you an idea of ​​where the foundation comes from and if you're enjoying this video, a subscription to the channel would be music to my ears, so I mentioned earlier that just before they were necessary.

Beats had created their own music streaming service, they called it Beats Music and I have to say one thing I did very well is help people find new songs. Beats had gotten radio hosts and artists to come together to create custom playlists and what that meant for you as a user is that you really felt like you had a friend out there who was curating tracks for you right now at the same time Spotify was on. Boom, they were getting millions of paid subscribers a month and Apple had nothing because I think for a long time, Steve Jobs had this idea that people would always want to own their music and so even when these services Music rental rates were increasing, Apple continued with its concept of the iTunes store where you would have to buy each track individually, but you can keep it forever, but I think it's fair to say that Apple got it wrong with Spotify and Beats Music made Apple give up. realized that not only was the average consumer increasingly happy to pay a monthly fee to stream music, but they could also make a lot more money doing this instead of having to convince every person to buy every song every time they want. .

You only need to convince them to subscribe once and then they will effectively buy from you automatically every month, it's just that when the time comes. Apple realized they were wrong about Spotify being so far ahead that catching up seemed like an impossible task, so they used Beats music, effectively copied beats as a recommendation engine and all the bass they had built, and then turned it off. and they began. its own equivalent of Apple Music and just built a system so Beats Music subscribers could easily transfer their subscriptions, so putting all this together when Apple first acquired Beads was a confusing move because yes, Beats was doing well , but it seemed like They were two very different companies, but what had actually happened is that Apple foresaw that, while these two were not competitors, they were about to be very soon.

Apple wanted to get into the audio market and therefore by purchasing them, they could effectively take things over. that Beats did well and uses them in their own products, but at the same time eliminates a future threat and I think this acquisition was a big part of why Beats went downhill. Think about it, when Beats was its own company, the incentive was simply how can we grow, how can we maintain the enthusiasm and continue to sell as many Beats products as possible? But as soon as Beats is absorbed under the Apple umbrella, the incentives change. It's less about what's good for Beats and more about how Beats can be used to make Apple more.

Well, there's one last thing, though one more thing that I think has really catalyzed this process of beats becoming irrelevant: the growing importance of reviews like this isn't the only measure, but if you just look at the size of the biggest YouTube. technology channels in 2010 vs. the largest technology channels in 2020, it is very clear that more than ever consumers are informed, consumers can now find out very easily if a product is good or bad and this new fact-based market strongly favors the brands. with higher levels of technical performance, so I think the natural trend that we're going to start to see over the years is that in addition to being marketed well for products to really be successful, they also need to be good, and that that's what happened beets they peaked and I don't think they're going back to it thanks for watching my name is aaron this is the lord who's the boss and I'll see you in the next one