Tesla wants to create an Apple Music rival for its cars

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music streaming
Elon Musk wants his cars to come with their own streaming music service.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac

Tesla is considering launching its own streaming music service, and it’s already in talks with players in the music industry about doing so.

According to a new report, Tesla has held conversations with all the major music labels about launching its service — which would come bundled with its cars, as opposed to being a standalone service like Apple Music.

“We believe it’s important to have an exceptional in-car experience so our customers can listen to the music they want from whatever source they choose,” a Tesla spokesperson told Re/code. “Our goal is to simply achieve maximum happiness for our customers.”

While an in-car service doesn’t put it into immediate competition with existing streaming services, it’s interesting that Tesla would choose to go it alone rather than inking a deal with a company like Spotify, Apple, or even Jay Z’s Tidal service.

Given how many pies Tesla founder Elon Musk has his fingers in, could this be a challenge to Apple somewhere down the road? (No pun intended.) Since both companies may well end up in the same electric car space, and they’ve already traded plenty of employees, we’re going to say… maybe?

Still, after talking about colonizing Mars and building a network of high-speed tunnels under Los Angeles, we can’t help but think that launching a “me too” streaming music service seems kind of a downgrade.

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