By Keith Nelson Jr.
With the advent of new technologies designed to mimic motherly qualities, human-to-human interaction is becoming increasingly foreign to a populace of tech-savvy consumers. Beats by Dre co-founders Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre, along with musical innovator Trent Reznor, are banking on the future of music consumption as a byproduct of human personalization and computer algorithms–streaming human curation. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of playlists created by interns and Beats Music staff employees, Beats Music also has playlists curated by radio personalities, broadcasters and experts from the music industry such as former Pitchfork Media editor-in-chief Scott Plagenhoef, former digital content director at XXL Carl Chery, and others. These playlists will appear in the ‘Highlights’ section in Beats Music, though there are currently no official plans for fans to contact the Highlights curators.
A vast majority of the playlists curated by the Beats Music staff, interns, and music experts are represented in their ‘Right Now’ section. The section provides a continuous stream from over 1.5 million customized playlists, based on users’ completion of a short survey which will be based on four variables: place, activity, person, and genre of music. Beats Music’s sustainability will be predicated on the speed of their playlist proliferation, which according to early reports has the Beats Music’ staff of 30 curators creating between 90 and 150 playlists a week in total.
As of now, Beats Music will cost $10 a month (or $100 for a year) and will not have an ad-supported free version similar to that of competitors Spotify and Pandora. While Beats will be the newcomer competing with Spotify’s 18 million active users and Pandora’s 70 million active users, the gap may shorten quickly following their partnership with AT&T. From the day of launch, AT&T customers will be able to bundle their Beats Music subscription with their monthly phone bill as a $10 add-on. The partnership saves customers money with the service provider’s Family plan, giving up to five members unlimited streaming and song downloading for $15 a month.
Three months prior to Beats Music launch, Spotify launched their new Browse feature, a collection of “over a billion” user-created playlists curated for certain moods, events, and the like. Perhaps Beats Music’s AT&T bundle will inspire Spotify to bring its own partnership with T-Mobile from Germany into the United States (T-Mobile began bundling Spotify Premium service to its customers in Germany for an additional 10 Euros ($13.70 USD) in August of 2012). With T-Mobile and AT&T recently launching promotional campaigns explicitly aimed at luring the other’s customers, this move seems to be inevitable.
Beats Music will be available on Windows Mobile, Google Android, Apple’s iOS, Sonos and web browsers.
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