There is talk about Apple buying Beats by Dre. To me it doesn’t make sense. Firstly, the design of the headphones don’t meet the Apple standard. They are not state-of-the-art. They sound good for a certain type of music that is bass heavy. There are brands that sound far better such as Bang & Olufsen and Sony. According to Wikipedia, on July 2, 2012, Beats announced it had acquired the online music service MOG in a purchase reported to have been between $10 million to $16 million. Now they want $3.2 Billion dollars for the music service and headphone business.
As an artist myself, the scary thing is everyone agrees the new paradigm is you can’t charge money for music anymore. WHAT? So, the multi-billion dollar iTunes business is about to crash. Imagine starting a business and spending billions in research and development (R&D), advertising, etc., that revolutionizes the industry and then some company comes along and gives the same thing away for free! Why did the music publishers allow this to start? The pressure came from pirating otherwise known as stealing. Enough people were stealing music causing the publishers to cave.
Along comes Spotify and Pandora. They opened the flood gates. Now, Apple might not only cave in and throw their multi-billion dollar business model out the window, it might cost them $3 Billion dollars to do it.
Here is a great question: Why are the service that delivers music and the headphones that the music plays through worth $3 Billion dollars and the music coming through the headphones is free?
Are Intellectual properties worthless? Artists continue do something they love that creates enjoyment for people yet, it has no tangible value in our society. Luckily for society, artists still create because that is what we do.
ISLAND HEAD reggae band New music out now! 