If there were among you those that liked Beats Audio on their Android devices, I’m afraid you may be seeing a lot less of it in the future as they’ve just been purchased by Apple for circa 3.2 billion dollars. Let all rumors be put to rest – the purchase is now official and now Apple owns the audio equipment and service company known as Beats. As part of that purchase, the streaming service known as Beats Music will also join the iTunes division.
Beats Music and iTunes were initially competitors, yet we may very well be seeing a merging of the two in the nearby future. The deal was to happen in the coming days and has just recently been confirmed by one of the founders of the company – Dr Dre and Tyrese Gibson, who announced the news on the actor’s Instagram page. As far as we know, this is the largest acquisition made by Apple , one that they would hope will boost its iTunes service considerably ( according to some reports, the album sales were down 13% and the track sales were down 11% ).
If anyone still remembers, Beats Audio sold 50.1% of their shares to HTC back in 2011. They’ve since been unhappy with that and re-bought those company shares last year, September 2013. Back then the company was valued at somewhere around 1 billion dollars, which means that in a short amount of time ( circa 6 moths, actually ), the company has more than tripled its estimated value.
Also, interestingly enough, this deal will make Dr. Dre the first ever billionaire hip-hop artist, for those of you who might care about that. Here’s hoping future phones will still afford to use this technology for their devices and Apple won’t do its usual thing and patent the living hell out of it so that others won’t be able to use it.
