A year ago, Trent Reznor announced his involvement as creative chief with Beats Music (formerly dubbed "Daisy"), a new music-streaming site being launched by Dr. Dre and Interscope Geffen A&M chairman Jimmy Iovine through Beats Electronics, the company that makes Beats by Dre headphones. Now the company has announced that the site will launch in January.
Beats Music's CEO Ian Rogers (formerly of The Beastie Boys crew, Yahoo Music and TopSpin) posted on his personal blog saying, "We are locked and loaded, ready to launch here in the U.S. in January 2014." There is no official launch date, though, and few details about the service have been announced publicly.
Rogers posted "facts" about the service in his blog which first assure readers that "Beats Music is real," and that they are in "an internal, private beta with people who know and love music (including a few of my personal heroes)." He says the company is "providing a few artists and other influencers access to familiarize them with the service and get their early feedback" and that they are making improvements based on the feedback they receive.
In the meantime, BeatsMusic.com is now open so that potential users can reserve their preferred usernames so that when the site launches they "aren't the equivalent of @iancr42."
As The New York Times notes, early marketing from the company suggests that the site intends to challenge Spotify as the predominant subscription streaming service. So far, the extent of the company's advertising for the site has been a full-page ad in The New York Times saying, "coming soon" but no other details. The rest of the marketing has fallen on word of mouth and press attention.
Beats Music will stream millions of songs to users for a monthly fee, similar to Spotify, Rdio and Rhapsody. According to early reports, the site will be based on MOG's (the service that Beats purchased for $14 million in 2012) technology but will be upgraded and include new features such as the ability for artists to interact with their fans. The idea is that experts will curate music for listeners.
According to Evolver.fm, "Once listeners find an artist they like, [the service] will reportedly help that artist sell stuff directly to those fans, ostensibly using Rogers' chops as the former CEO of TopSpin, which specializes in direct-to-fan marketing and sales. ....the goal is to do for music discovery and consumption what Beats did for the sound quality of mainstream headphones."
In a 2012 interview with The New Yorker, Reznor described the site as a "platform in which the machine and the human would collide more intimately." He said the service "uses mathematics to offer suggestions to the listener... [but also] would present choices based partly on suggestions made by connoisseurs...like having your own guy when you go into the record store, who knows what you like but can also point you down some paths you wouldn't necessarily have encountered."
Considering many other services have the feature for fans to "follow" celebrity recommendations, the question remains how their curating system will be better or different than what currently exists. Reznor claims, "Here's sixteen million licensed pieces of music,' they've said, but you're not stumbling into anything. What's missing is a service that adds a layer of intelligent curation."
Another question is that with all the hype around musicians getting the short end of the payout stick, how (and how much) will their site be compensating artists? Time will tell whether this is a site that artists will stand behind.
What do you think of the service? Would you subscribe? What would you like to see the company do? Let us know in the comments below!
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