Gadgetory

hey this is Ben papa from the verge today beats is launching a streaming music service making it the newest competitor in an increasingly competitive market I'm talking today with Ian Roger CEO of beats music you chat about how they plan to stand apart from the pack and why finding new songs to love is actually harder than ever what is beats music beats music is the first music service that's actually a service and not a server in the sense that it's of service to the listener you open it up and you're five seconds and one hand from hearing something that makes you want to roll down the window and crank the volume to the right so there is a lot of competition in the space obviously there's established players like Spotify there's big tech giants like Google and Apple jumping in what do you think it is that's gonna differentiate beats I think you were talking about it just a little bit now but is it mostly gonna be that angle of discovery and curation that's gonna set it apart from the competition yeah I I gotta be honest I don't really think there's a lot of competition for what we're doing I mean there are other streaming services out there and I think the services that are out there I've answered the question of what is the next format okay so not to take anything away from them I think you know establishing a big catalog and giving access to a big catalogue of music is is a great first step the subscription services that are out there today are great if I have a copy of my favorite music magazine in my hand or if I'm also you know looking at pitchfork com the vision is really putting those two together and you open up an app on your phone and you hit play and you're like oh man that is incredible so I'll push back on that a little bit I mean when I'm playing around on Spotify a lot of times I check the pitchfork app on there and they upload you know their their favorite new music so I discover new stuff through Spotify via pitchfork you guys will have the same kind of tastemakers on their Rolling Stone in pitchfork and double-xl I guess one of the things that beats was talking about which team unique was having you know this group of 30 or 40 human curators who were gonna be pushing out new playlist all the time you know that I might discover somebody who's really tuned in to my taste or showing me new things who are these humans that you guys are getting in there and why do you think they work better than stuff that's algorithmically generated yeah so we have a great editorial staff as a woman named Julie pilot who leads our curation and music and relations staff and then we got plugin Hoff who was formerly the editor of pitchfork who leads our editorial staff and then to go through that whole staff I mean they're incredible we have Karl chair I used to be a double XL Suzy Cole was a program director at the last rock and roll station on the on the planet the riff in Detroit we have are in Timmerman's who's the pop music correspondent for CNN ken Tucker in Nashville fuzzy fantabulous it was 17 years on power 106 in LA Cotte who am I forgetting Mason Williams from-from rhino I mean there and I'm forgetting people but there's there's there's more so they lead that each of their respective areas but they have then they reach out to the community and bring more people in what do you think about how beats will work in terms of the value for the label or the artists you know a lot of people have criticized the streaming services Spotify in particular but all of them for not giving enough back to the artists who are being streamed you're gonna have the same approaches everybody else or are you gonna try something different well it's different in a couple levels first of all because we don't have free it's actually fundamentally different alright so if you look at if you look at the services that that have free streaming it pays the free streams pay a lot less so since we don't have a free service we actually pay more on a per stream basis a lot of the services that we've been talking about who are competitors here in the states and also in Europe and maybe some of the ones from your coming here now like Deezer have struggled to turn a profit I guess long term do you think that beats the streaming music company and beats the headphone are synergistic and you don't expect beats music to be a profitable company or do you think long term you know the streaming service will be able to be self-sustaining and profitable the streaming service needs to be self-sustaining and profitable we are a standalone company we spun a company out of Beats Electronics last year so we are a sister company of beats but you know it needs to have its own piano and stand on its own two feet it's really not a complicated business though I mean I think that others have made it complicated by spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year with this free feature that's really kind of a marketing feature but the paid subscription model is pretty straightforward there's margin and every subscriber and you've just got to scale your numbers your number of subscribers larger than your fixed cost base it's really more about how do you scale it because it you know if you if you can't scale it to millions of subscribers then the business doesn't work but I really believe that you know between the product we have the brand that we have the partnerships we have and then what we are capable of internationally that you know we can invest in this business and grow to you know tens of millions of subscribers over the coming years and I think that's all the question I had one that came back to me you said that you're planning to pay the Indies and the majors the same which isn't like your competitors does that mean you're gonna have more kind of obscure indie stuff I find that a lot of times I'm not seeing the artists I like or the labels I like on the streaming service it's a it's a really great question I think that I'm a mix so excited about our catalogue and our team for a couple of reasons to come back to the the the curators that you asked me about earlier two things first of all we've actually removed millions of tracks from our catalogue I don't know if your if you've kept up on what's happening with this people with the spammers in the catalogue but it's it's real problem you have people that are uploading sound-alikes cover versions karaoke versions trying to insert themselves and get plays and make a couple of pennies here and there and and it's just confusing for the consumer right you know I was doing this thing on my seven-year-old and wanting to hear thrift shop and Here I am on MOG our service and it was difficult for me to tell which one was the real song right and we actually ended up listening to one that turned out not to be the right not to actually be Macklemore so we've actually we've gone to pains to get a lot of that that bad content out the the truly it's spam so that that's one side of it we actually care enough we're not like who rose the most tracks right it we want to have a great consumer experience so we've gotten a lot of that spam out on the other side of it because we have these curators with that what we're doing is that gives us a lot of direction in terms of what catalog are we missing all right so we're not trying to say oh let's go get those guys because they've got a million tracks you know when you have a curator like des magazine which is core metal what you find out is the metal record the metal labels you don't have really quickly right because those guys come in and they go these on the top these are the 40 metal records in 2013 that matter and then you know okay well and then you find out oh we're actually missing that label that label that label and they might be small labels that only have a couple of you know that have a relatively small roster but those but put the roster is good because there are small selective labels that are to a core audience so I think because of our curators we actually go after catalog in a different way than our competitors do because we're not on a race to you know who can who can do a press release with the most tracks it's it's who has the music that people care about what else see you've been listening to over the last year I'll I'll point you to my best of 2014 2013 listing you'll have a mixtape on there that I could probably go to my profile at I am CR on beats music and I actually do sort of a weekly or maybe twice a monthly mixtape and you can you can hear you know what I'm into from Aretha Franklin and just lying the family stone - you know Kurt Vile - Mastodon well thanks for coming and chatting with us today and I look forward to hearing it thanks for having me appreciate it