As you might have heard by now, Apple has officially acquired Beats by paying a cool $3 billion for the company, making it one of Apple’s largest acquisitions over the years. It was a surprising move as Apple tends to more interested in acquihires, not to mention some of Beats’ products like Beats Music did seem like a competition to Apple’s own iTunes Radio.
That being said, GQ recently conducted an interview with Beats’ Jimmy Iovine who was named as one of GQ’s Men of the Year, and in the interview Iovine revealed how he managed to convince Apple to acquire the company.
According to Iovine, “I convinced them that they had to buy this company. I said, ‘I don’t want to work for anybody else. I want to do this at Apple. I know I can achieve this at Apple. I don’t want to shop it. I wanna come here, to Steve’s company. I know you guys; I know what you’re capable of; I know you get popular culture. I know you have a hole in music right now; let me plug it.’ I think it was two years before they said yeah.”
It’s actually interesting to note that it took Beats and Apple a couple of years to arrive at an agreement, especially when you consider that iTunes Radio was only released last year. In any case there have been rumors that Beats could somehow see an integration into iTunes next year, which will hopefully give us a better idea as to what we can expect in the future from this collaboration.
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