Apple isn’t shutting down Beats Music service, the stream music service it bought in May, but the company isn’t planning to keep the brand name around much longer, reports Recode’s John Paczkowski who says Apple’s rebranding of the streaming music service could come as early as next year.
Rumors that the Beats Music service would be shutting down surfaced yesterday on Techcrunch, but were quickly refuted by an Apple spokesman who said the company won’t be shutting Beats Music down, but Recode elaborated that it will be integrated into a service of Apple’s own making in the future, as a way for the company to keep Beats a hardware-only brand.
Citing ‘industry scuttlebutt’, Recode now claims the new version of Apple’s subscription music service will be timed to debut with the Grammy Awards, to be held on February 8th 2015.
No word yet on what Apple will name the new brand or what new features might come with it, but Apple has reportedly been working on a new audio-visual album format with U2 and other artists that could play a role in the service.
Apple promised to keep Beats Music as a standalone product when it acquired the app in May as part of its $3 billion acquisition of Beats Electronics. Support for the Windows and Android versions of the app has been maintained even after Apple’s acquisition, but it could be that Apple is looking to make Beats’ tech and style iOS-only.
Source: Recode
Buster Hein is a freelance writer who lives in Phoenix, Arizona. Twitter: @bst3r.
2 responses to “Apple to reveal rebranded version of Beats Music in February”
Maybe that’s why they’ve been a complete failure at introducing iTunes Radio to Canada? Perhaps the plan is to bring Apple Beats to Canada eventually? They’ll have a hard time. Google Music has been here for about 6 months, and I’m a happy subscriber. Can’t understand why Apple let this one go…
If they’re launching an update to Beats, that probably means that the apple watch is coming then too.