So the big tech story this week is that Apple's buying Beats. All of it, the headphones, the speakers, and that streaming service nobody I know actually pays for, for something like $3 billion, which is apparently the biggest acquisition in Apple's history by a mile. Cash and stock, Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre reportedly staying on, the whole thing. Every single tech site I read this morning had some version of the same headline, so I'm not going to rehash the deal terms here. You've read it five times already by the time you got to me.
What I keep thinking about instead is that video. You probably saw it too, the one from a couple weeks back where Dre's at some party with Tyrese and says on camera that he's "the first billionaire in hip hop," clearly talking about a deal that hadn't been announced yet. Apple hadn't said a word publicly at that point. It got pulled down fast, obviously, but not fast enough, because the internet doesn't forget and screenshots are forever. I love that this is apparently how a multi-billion dollar acquisition leaks now, not a regulatory filing, not an anonymous source at the WSJ, but a guy at a party getting a little too excited on camera. Iovine's been in the music business since the 70s and even he couldn't keep his own artist quiet for two weeks.
Anyway, here's my actual complaint, the one that has nothing to do with Apple's balance sheet. I do not get Beats headphones. At all. I've tried a pair, my roommate has the Studio ones, the big red-and-black over-ear kind that run something like $300, and they sound like someone wrapped a subwoofer around your skull. Everything is bass. Kanye could be whispering and it would still rattle your teeth. I get that some people want that, fine, taste is taste, but I've got a $22 pair of earbuds from a no-name brand I bought at a drugstore in an airport because I forgot my real ones, and they sound more balanced than headphones that cost fourteen times as much. I'm not saying this to be a contrarian internet guy about it either, I genuinely think the whole category is priced on the logo and the box design more than anything happening inside the drivers.
Which I guess is sort of the point of the acquisition, if I think about it for more than a paragraph of complaining. Apple isn't buying Beats because the audio engineering is some secret sauce they couldn't build in-house, they build the audio hardware in every iPhone, they know what they're doing. They're buying a brand that teenagers actually want to wear in public, which is a thing Apple has never really had in the accessories aisle. Their own headphones were still the free white earbuds everybody complains about and immediately swaps out. Beats solved a marketing problem Apple couldn't solve with engineering, and apparently that's worth three billion dollars now.
The streaming piece is the part I actually find more interesting long-term, honestly, and it's the part getting the least attention in the headlines I've seen today. Beats Music has been out since January, it's a fine service from what little I've used of the trial, but it's nowhere near Spotify in size. If this is Apple quietly buying its way into subscription streaming because iTunes downloads are clearly not the future forever, that's a bigger deal than headphone bass. Nobody's writing that headline today though, everyone wants to talk about Dre.
I'll say this too: I don't think I'll ever be a person who owns a $300 pair of headphones no matter who makes them. Give me my $22 airport earbuds and a laptop with reasonable volume and I am a happy man. Maybe that makes me the wrong audience entirely, which is probably exactly what Apple's marketing department would tell me if I said any of this to their face.