Apple is planning to make Beats Music a core part of iOS, unleashing it on every iDevice within the next major update.
According to the Financial Times, Apple is planning to bring the recently-acquired Beats brand further into the fold, by making the Beats Music service a mandatory part of iOS.
Currently, Apple doesn’t bundle the app with new devices, instead gently encouraging people to use its own service rather than market leader Spotify, but an update which is expected to roll out in early 2015 looks to change that.
The FT claims that Apple is planning on making a big push to gain a foothold in the lucrative streaming music market and views Beats Music as the perfect tool to do so. In fact, the purchase of Beats from Dr Dre last year, for the princely sum of $3bn, was said to have been heavily motivated by the service and its perceived potential.
Adding Beats Music to iOS as a core app is likely viewed internally as the perfect way to gain recognition for the undersubscribed service by Apple, but consumers may well feel differently.
Recently, the addition of U2’s latest album to people’s devices as a ‘gift’ was shown to be a misguided choice on Apple’s part, with consumers taking to social media in their droves to vent their ire, and the decision to streamline yet another piece of software on to people’s limited device storage, without giving them a choice, could well be viewed in a similar fashion.
We can’t help that feel that perhaps offering a service which offers more than competitors at a fair price might be a more savvy business model, but we aren’t on the board of one of the world’s biggest tech companies, so what do we know?
Will forcibly integrating Beats Music into iOS be a success? Let us know what you think.
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