In an interesting Wall Street Journal profile of Beats founders Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre, the two music industry vets and current Apple employees describe their new $70m undergraduate academy at the University of Southern California as a training ground for future Apple and Beats employees.
“We wanted to build a school that we feel is what the entertainment industry needs right now,” Iovine is quoted as saying. “There’s a new kid in town, and he’s brought up on an iPad from one and a half years old. But the problem with some of the companies up north [in Silicon Valley] is that they really are culturally inept.”
“I’ve been shocked at the different species in Northern and Southern California—we don’t even speak the same language. The kid who’s going to have an advantage in the entertainment industry today is the kid who speaks both languages: technology and liberal arts. That’s what this school is about.”
Iovine and Dre poured funding the USC Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy for Arts, Technology and Business of Innovation, prior to Apple acquiring Beats for a whopping $3 billion.
In addition to the Apple-esque mantra of bridging the gap between “technology and liberal arts,” the article also discusses streaming music, which is a key concern to Apple seeing as its iTunes downloads are increasingly being overtaken by services like Spotify.
“Streaming was actually first [before headphones],” Iovine says. “I couldn’t get it done. I didn’t have the platform. But once I had Beats, I had the platform. It’s a piece of equipment, a piece of hardware. And I wanted to build a piece of software that worked with it.”
Iovine also notes that he always wanted to sell his subscription service to Apple, although Steve Jobs passed on it. “Every deal I made, I offered to Apple,” he is quoted as saying. “I only wanted to work with Apple.”
The article doesn’t offer any confirmation about the reason Apple made Beats its largest ever acquisition, but does offer a potentially revealing tidbit from Iovine about the importance of combining the art creation and distribution models:
“I think what you’re seeing more and more are companies that are designed to do multiple things. If you look at the Beats model, there’s software and hardware. Look at what Amazon is doing; look at what Google’s trying to do. It’s technology and content in one … [Sony] had it. They had the Walkman, they had the PlayStation. And they bought Columbia Pictures and Columbia Records, so they had the content. But they never finished the thought—and Apple ended up with the products. Where do you think Steve got the idea?”
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
3 responses to “Dr. Dre teams up with Jimmy Iovine to create school for future Beats employees”
For future beats employees? What are they doing exactly selling or modifying their beloved beats profile, or providing customer service reading from a script.
I would be embarrassed to get a degree from a college with Iovine and Dre’s names attached to it. neither of those two knuckleheads even went to college, Those guys are just knowlegeable in putting out crappy records. Neither of them actually ran Beats, they were just investors and wore the headphones publicly and used guerrilla marketing by getting their celebrity friends to wear them. Otherwise, they hired other people to actually design the products and run/manage the actual company. Yet, they take all all of the credit. What scam artists.
“Streaming was actually first [before headphones],” Iovine says. “I couldn’t get it done. I didn’t have the platform. But once I had Beats, I had the platform. It’s a piece of equipment, a piece of hardware. And I wanted to build a piece of software that worked with it.”
That’s the DUMBEST bunch of BS i’ve read to date. A Headphone is NOT a platform for a subscription service. Headphones are just speakers you wear and they’ve been around since 1910. Headphones is NOT a platform. Iovine is dumber than I originally thought. What a F-ing IDIOT.
If you are a kid that hasn’t gone to college, lesson learned, don’t bypass an education, you don’t want to end up as DUMB as Iovine or Dre. These guys are about the DUMBEST idiots connected to a high tech company. Shame on Cook for allowing these IDIOTS in Apple.