Apple Buys Beats Electronics And Music For $3 Billion In Its Largest Acquisition Yet

Beats is now part of Apple.

Listen up, music fans. If you use Beats headphones or listen to Beats streaming music service, there’s a new company in charge of servicing your ears: Apple has confirmed that it’s buying Beats Electronics LLC for $3 billion, which includes both the streaming-music service as well as its headphones business.

Not only will that hefty sum bring in the headphones and streaming customers, but it will also fold Beats’ co-founders into the Apple mix, Dr. Dre and music mogul Jimmy Iovine, reports the Wall Street Journal. The price tag includes $2.6 billion in cash and $400 million in stock.

Those big names in the music business will serve to make Apple “cool” again, see? Apple can use Iovine and Dre’s pop culture credibility and bend it to its will to shill music to all those hip young people with money, say industry insiders.

“Apple was starting to lose their edge,” said Sony Music Entertainment Chief Executive Doug Morris, who used to be Iovine’s boss back in the day.

The Beats brand will stay alive instead of being subsumed by Apple, which is somewhat of a first for the Cupertino company. But CEO Tim Cook sounds like he’s ready to join the cool kids at their lunch table, and connect Silicon Valley to Hollywood.

“We think these guys have a very rare talent,” Cooks told the WSJ of Iovine and Dr. Dre. “We love the subscription service that they built—we think it’s the first subscription service that really got it right.”

Apple Buys Beats for $3 Billion, Tapping Tastemakers to Regain Music Mojo [Wall Street Journal]

by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist