Beats Music Will Remain On Android & Windows Phone, Tim Cook Reassures

As you might have heard by now, Apple has officially announced that they would be acquiring Beats for a whopping $3 billion, one of their largest and public acquisitions to date. In the past when Apple has acquired companies, they usually shutdown its services, especially when they know that it will be available on a competing platform like Android and Windows Phone, so what will be the fate of Beats Music that launched earlier this year?

Well the good news for Beats Music subscribers is that it looks like Apple will be keeping the service alive. This was confirmed by Tim Cook to the Financial Times (paywall) who said that, “It’s all about the music”. What this means is that the app will still continue to be available on both the Android and Windows Phone platform, even after the deal is finalized, which is expected to take place in Q4 2014 pending regulatory approval.

In a way it would seem as though that Beats Music could come off as a higher-end version of iTunes Radio, which for the most part is free to stream. Beats Music on the other hand only offers a 7-day trial period, after which listeners are expected to subscribe to the service if they wish to keep on listening to the music being offered on the platform.

As it stands, Beats Music does not command a huge subscriber base. In fact last we heard, it had around 111,000 subscribers as of March, a number which presumably has grown since then. The rumors were saying that Apple’s purchase of Beats was originally around $3.2 billion, but later revised that number due to the lower subscriber base, which did not come across as valuable, at least compared to Spotify’s 10 million paid subscribers.

In any case for now it looks like Beats Music is here to stay. What Apple will do with the brand/service remains unknown, so current subscribers can rest easy knowing that their subscriptions are still good.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Audio
Tags: Android, Apps, Beats Music, Windows Phone