What happened to Beats by Dre?

so there's a good chance that if you clicked on this video you remember beets when i was growing up beets were everywhere every street every corner every cafe you couldn't leave the house without seeing beets and even for the people who couldn't afford them like me just the promise of fake beats was tantalizing so what happened how is it that within 10 years beats went from the brand of people's dreams to this side chick company who just silently pops out a new product every now and again well beats had an incredible start the face of the company was this american rapper called dr dre and one day he looked at apple and realized hey wait a second this company's out here selling 400 ipods supplied with one dollar earphones he did not like these earphones like as far as dre was concerned the only thing they were good enough for was to just check that your sound worked this was a two-sided coin for him because on one hand he took this as a bit of an insult you know he's out there in a studio all day all night just pouring love into his tracks to make them sound good but no one could appreciate it but on the other hand he saw this as a golden opportunity so he took it him and his business partner then built a pair of headphones to fill this gap and because of how they then leveraged all of their celebrity contacts like right from the very first product beats just flew like before they even launched their first headphones they sent out 15 pairs to lebron james world famous basketball player turns out these headphones ended up on the heads of every single one of the 2008 olympic us team that's ultimate exposure and it's actually better than paying for adverts because instead of people rolling their eyes or trying to fast forward this was the equivalent of people's childhood heroes saying to them hey buy these headphones to be more like me and it was not just basketball players they gave nicki minaj an exclusive set of pink ones lil wayne was sent custom diamond encrusted ones they got justin bieber on board lady gaga had her own set of earphones made after her and david guetta had his own headphones made after him and here's the clever part beats made absolute sure that these guys got their headphones just before they were about to either go on tour or do a performance or make a music video because they knew full well our headphones look cool and these guys are getting a custom headphone made for them of course they're going to want to show them off but here's the thing beats were never the best sounding headphones they were never the best quality headphones they were definitely not good value for money but the one thing they did well was to just target to market that nobody else had targeted before they recognized that up until this point premium headphones were just considered an enthusiastic tool this endless slew of boring looking black and grey gadgets that were only made for professionals but by associating with just cool people and by giving customers so many fun colors and designs to choose from they created a premium headphone that everyone wanted even if it was just to compliment an outfit now the other stroke of genius was the simple fact that beads were tuned to exaggerate bass which is the main thing that those one dollar apple earphones were lacking and so for all of those users people who jumped from those to these people who never really tried proper high-end headphones beats genuinely did sound amazing in comparison and so as well as that aspirational effect that whole seeing your childhood heroes on tv use beets and wanting them because of that there was also the secondary effect of consumers recommending beets to other consumers and so within just a few short years beets have managed to gain 70 of the premium headphone market i repeat 70 percent by selling headphones that cost just 20 to make you know what else cost 20 to make uh wish.conference and they were just getting started they then worked with hp to integrate beats audio into laptops and htc to integrate it into phones they were building their own music subscription service which is exactly the future that we've moved to now how do you go wrong from there well in 2014 beets was bought by apple and while it didn't really seem like it at the time this was the beginning of the end for beets on the face of it this was one of the strangest acquisitions of the decade why would apple of all companies spend so much money this was their biggest acquisition ever by the way on a brand of fashion first headphones that were scoffed out by anyone who really cared about sound apple's getting criticized left right and center for this acquisition but let me ask you a question which company do you think is the biggest seller of earphones now it's not beats it's apple and this acquisition is a big part of why apple knew full well in 2014 that wireless earphones were about to explode they saw this content boom coming the fact that it feels like almost every person on the planet now uses their smartphone to listen to music or podcasts or watch netflix shows on and so they realized preemptively how important a good pair of wireless earphones was going to be but they didn't want everyone to be using beats headphones they want everyone to be using apple headphones and so you can probably see where i'm going with this when apple bought beats they had no intention at all of collabing with them of making joint products or really using the beats brand at all for anything apple i think that right from the start apple bought beats with the intention of dissecting them and basically using all the resources they could gather to fuel apple products and that's basically what happened apple practically pillaged beats his audio engineers their talent their ideas their technologies and used them to make airpods airpods pro homepods and most recently airpods max they do still sell beats you can go onto the official apple store head to the music section and find beats products and apple has actually equipped those beats products with apple built chips so that they work really well with iphones because why not the beads brand still has value in it so apple might as well just continue to make profit from it but you will notice that while they haven't killed it it really does look like they're letting the beats brand die apple is reinvesting very little in beets's long-term future and while they have released some new beats products if you look a little closer you'll see that they've only upgraded ones that don't compete with apple's own like apple hasn't refreshed the beats pros at all because they knew full well that they were coming out with their own pro headphones they practically left the beats pill to rot and they scrapped the smart speaker that beats was working on too because apple needs as little competition as possible in the speaker market the main two products that they've kept are the sports focus power beats and the fashion focused over ear headphones and that's just because right now apple doesn't have one of its own products to fill those spaces but you can bet your bottom dollar that the minutes they do beats are out now you've heard of apple music right the company's big budget monthly subscription music streaming service well i'll give you one guess where the foundations of that came from and if you're enjoying this video a sub to the channel would be music to my ears so i mentioned earlier that just before they were required beats had built a music streaming service of their own they called it beats music and i gotta say one thing i did really well is help people find new songs beats had gotten radio hosts and artists themselves on board to create custom playlists and what that meant for you as a user is that you really felt like you had a friend out there who was hand-picking tracks for you now at the same time spotify was booming they were getting millions of paying subscribers a month and apple had nothing because i think for the longest time steve jobs had this idea that people would always want to own their music and so even as these music rental services were picking up apple just continued to run with their concept of the itunes store where you'd have to buy every track individually but you do get to keep it forever but i think it's fair to say that apple was wrong about this spotify and beats music made apple realize that not only was the average consumer becoming more okay with paying a monthly fee to stream music but also that you could earn way more money by doing this instead of having to convince each person to buy each song every time they wanted to you only need to convince them to subscribe once and then effectively they're buying from you automatically every month it's just that by the time apple realized that they were wrong about this spotify was so far ahead that catching up seemed like an impossible task so they used beats music they effectively copied beats as recommendation engine and the entire bass that they'd built and then they shut it down and started their own apple music equivalent and just built a system so that beats music subscribers could easily transfer their subscriptions across so to bring this all together when apple first acquired beads it was a confusing move because yes beats were doing well but it just kind of seemed like they were two very different companies but what had actually happened is that apple foresaw that while these two weren't competitors yet they were about to be very soon apple wanted in on the audio market and so by buying them out they could effectively take the things that beats did well and use them in their own products but at the same time eliminate a future threat and i think this acquisition was a big part of why beats went downhill think about it when beats was its own company the incentive was just how do we get bigger how do we keep the excitement up and keep selling as many beats products as possible but as soon as beats is absorbed under apple's umbrella the incentives change it's less about what's good for beats and it's more how can beats be used to make apple more profit okay there's one final thing though one more thing which i think has really catalyzed this process of beats drifting away into irrelevance it's the increasing importance of reviews like this isn't the only measure but if you just look at the size of the largest youtube tech channels back in 2010 versus the largest tech channels in 2020 it's very clear that more than ever consumers are informed consumers can very easily find out now whether a product is good or whether a product is bad and this new fact-based market strongly favors brands with higher levels of technical performance and so i think the natural trend that we're just going to start seeing over the years is that as well as being marketed well for products to truly succeed they also just need to be good so that's what happened to beets they had their peak and i don't think they're going to return to it thanks for watching my name is aaron this is mr who's the boss and i'll catch you in the next one you

Channel: Mrwhosetheboss

Views: 3,465,482

Rating: 4.9504499 out of 5

Keywords: beats, beats by dre, dr dre, beats headphones, apple, ios, beats solo, beats studio, beats wireless, best beats headphones, headphones, tech, smartphones, dr. dre

Id: 5P5hYvlKz7w

Length: 10min 11sec (611 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 02 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/freelittyta]

My parents gave me a set of the original beats. I wanted so bad to return them for something else that was 400 Canadian dollars, but that's not how gifts work at my house.

I used them until the batteries that came with them died, and them I packed them away. Never to be touched again.

What I remember is that they were hissy. Like when you the music wasn't playing you could hear a hiss. A very noticeable hiss.

It was also really irritating that you couldn't use them without batteries. Just let me use them without sound cancelling for gosh sake.

They sounded ok, very similar to those Panasonic rp-htx7 (?) That were all the rage back then. But those cost 14.99 at Walmart. Not 400 Canadian bucks. And they weren't hissy.

[u/elroy45]

Really intresting thank you

[u/WarHead75]

The sound leakage of the original Beats Studio was so bad that they were practically open back. The newer Beats are still terrible but nowhere near as bad as their mark 1s.

[u/zCYNICALifornia]

Not sure what I did to deserve silver, but thanks all the same. Cheers!

[u/fuzeebear]

Beats bad

[u/Creato938]

The worst part of when Beats got sold to Apple is that Monster didn't get one cent out of it.

[u/daru1848]

I wish Apple actually changed the beats line with better drivers and everything, I own the Studio 3 and they’re horrible compared to the AirPods Pro which are in ear headphones. Now with the Max’s at a whoping £550 I think the beats line can coexist with Apple, have the casing made out of platic but at least some good drivers.

I’m a bass head so I wouldn’t mind loads of bass but the bass on beats headphones is horrible

Apple probably had a influence on the beats solo pro which sound amazing for what they are and have really good build quality. If they did the same for the studios then I think beats could have a better future

[u/akkinzer349900]

I’ve got a pair of Powerbeats and I rather like them. But when I’m wearing them I’m prioritizing portability and their reliability to stay in my ears. Also, I prefer their sound slightly to AirPods and it is nice to have to IOS compatibility.

[u/john-rambro]

I have a pair of beats studio 2s I bought for about 100 bucks. Couldn't pass it up. They are sound great IMO and are super comfortable.

I was able to compare them side by side to a pair of m50x and JBL 950NCs and they the beats sounded significantly better and they were more comfortable. The bass wasn't even close on the m50x - not sure why these are even on the map.

Not saying Beats are priced fair at retail but I doubt most people that trash them or up vote the trashing comments have ever tried the beats studios. I tested 6 pairs of headphones in the $100-200 range before settling on the beats. The 2 listed above were side by side.

The device and batteries have also continued to last. I have had them several years now. They show no wear.

I would recommend adding them to a list of head phones to try before you make the decision of what you settle on.