Beats Music to Enter Online Streaming Market

As previous reports indicated, Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre are ready to launch their next project, Beats Music, a subscription streaming service that enters the ring with Spotify, Pandora and Apple’s iTunes Radio to challenge their respective positions in terms of digital music consumption. According to its makers, the new service is set to decide for its users what to listen to.

“What song comes next,” Iovine said, “is as important as what song is playing now.”

Beats Music is scheduled to arrive in the United States on January 21 and with a decrease in digital music sales in 2013 for the first time ever, some argue the timing could not be better because already existing paid services have not matched some artists’s expectations in terms of royalty rates. Beats Music offers a similar set of services as Spotify, Rhapsody or any other music app. For $10 a month, it offers access to practically all the recorded music, with playlists to keep its customers tuned in. It also has the same music at its disposal since it has licensing deals with the same record labels as its competitors. However, relying on the visual appeal and the expertise of its programmers and curators, Beats Music dares to differ. U2’s Bono seems to agree:

“There’s so much music to hear online, people have become a bit deaf to the choices. Jimmy [Iovine] believes that Beats-style curation will become the discovery model that the music business is waiting for. I would never bet against him.”

Ian Rogers, the chief executive of Beats Music, is confident too as he argues that Beats Music’s main competitors will inevitably fail because they rely too heavily on computer algorithms and because the people behind them just misunderstand music. Do you agree?