Dre Announced the Beats Deal Before Apple Did (Whoops)

So this has been bouncing around my feeds for about a week now and I still think its one of the funnier tech stories of the year so far. Short version: everybody and their cousin has been reporting since around May 9th that Apple is in talks to buy Beats Electronics, the headphone and streaming company Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine built, for something like $3.2 billion. Thats already a wild number for a company that mostly sells $200 plastic headphones with a red lowercase b on the side. But the actual funny part happened a few days later.

Dre posted a video, the kind of thing that was clearly meant to be private or at least semi-private, where he flat out calls himself "the first billionaire in hip hop." Not "reportedly," not "sources say," the guy just said it, on camera, like the ink was already dry. Except it wasnt. As of me typing this, Apple hasnt confirmed a single thing officially. No press release, no Tim Cook quote, nothing on apple.com. Just a pile of anonymous-sourced reporting and now a rapper who apparently didnt get the memo about waiting for legal to finish paperwork.

Ive seen a few sites walking it back since, saying the deal isnt actually done done, that there's still negotiating happening, that Dre jumped the gun. Which, sure, maybe. But you dont accidentally say "first billionaire in hip hop" into a camera. That's not a slip of the tongue, thats a guy who was told a number and got excited. I dont blame him honestly. If someone told me a company I co-founded was about to sell for over three billion dollars I probably wouldnt keep it together for a press embargo either.

Heres my actual opinion on this, separate from the gossip of it: I think its a genuinely strange acquisition for Apple to make, if it happens the way its being described. Apple has never bought anything close to this size, theyre historically a company that buys small teams and technology, not a consumer brand with its own retail presence and its own baggage. And Beats headphones, look, Ill just say it: I dont get the appeal. Ive tried a pair of Solo HDs that a friend had and the bass was so boosted it felt like someone was tuning the sound for a car trunk, not for actual listening. I know that's the point for a lot of people. It's just not my point. I'll take a plain pair of Sony cans that cost a third as much and dont advertise a logo to everyone standing next to me on the train.

What I think is actually going on, and this is just my read, is that Apple isnt really buying headphones. Theyre buying Beats Music, the subscription streaming service that launched earlier this year, and theyre buying Jimmy Iovine and Dre themselves, the relationships, the ability to get artists and labels to answer the phone. iTunes has been slipping as the default way people think about buying music, and Apple knows it. Paying a huge premium for a subscription service with a fraction of Spotifys user numbers only makes sense if what youre really paying for is the two guys who come with it.

Anyway. We'll see if this actually gets announced for real in the next week or two, or if it quietly falls apart and everyone pretends the leaked video never happened. Either way I wanted to write this down now, while its still just a rumor with an extremely premature victory lap attached to it, because if the deal does go through, every single tech blog on the internet is going to run the same "Apple buys Beats for $X billion, heres what it means" post within about four hours of the announcement, and I'd rather have this weirder, smaller version of the story on the record first.

Small unrelated aside: I also spent part of this week reading up on the new Surface Pro 3 that Microsoft showed off Tuesday, the 12-inch one with the kickstand that supposedly goes flat enough to use as a drafting table. Not buying one. But I'll admit the "laptop replacement" pitch is a lot more convincing on this version than it was on the Pro 2 I've been lugging around, and thats a bigger compliment than I expected to be giving Microsoft this year.