Beats Music Plans To Crush Spotify Through Algorithms

Beats' Music aims to crush all other streaming music providers by using a complex and unique algorithm to find music specifically catered to your listening tastes

Read more on Wired

"Beats Music won’t be joining the most-tracks arms race when it launches Tuesday. Instead, the new subscription service brought to you by Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre will win converts through a potent mix of smarter algorithms and human curation. From the moment you first open the app, every interaction is recorded and used to determine the next album, playlist, and track to serve up. The result is more like a personalized mixtape than an online jukebox.

“No one was doing a music service; everyone was building a music server,” Beats Music chief executive Ian Rogers told WIRED. While services like Spotify, Rdio, and Rhapsody have some social discovery tools built in, they all launched similar products in an era when the rule was he with the most tracks wins. As a result, those companies got caught in a race to be the biggest. As they concentrated on the enormity of their music catalogs, their discovery mechanisms lagged. For instance, Rdio’s “Heavy Rotation” discovery option presents you with music your friends currently are enjoying, but it’s not smart enough to tell you to listen to David Bowie’s Hunky Dory because you love Lou Reed’s Transformer.

That’s where Beats Music is different. The service is betting on smarts instead of sheer depth. While it will have enough songs to compete — anybody entering the game at this point has to — with a library millions of tracks deep, it hopes its unique approach to music discovery tools will give it an edge.

As soon as you begin using the streaming service, Beats starts logging your “music DNA.” This serves as a personal profile used to determine which albums and tracks would be most relevant to you. To start generating your DNA, the service asks rudimentary questions, like which bands and genres you love.

But it takes other things into account. Your age is especially important to Beats Music. Tell it when you were born, and it figures out when you were in high school. The music of your youth — the stuff that was popular when you first got a Walkman or an iPod, the band that made it big when you got your driver’s license, the record that was all over MTV just before your freshman year of college — is the music with the strongest memories for you. It’s a fixed point in time that’s the most culturally and musically relevant to you. And it’s being crunched by the company’s algorithm.

Your sex matters, too; women and men usually have different tastes. Also important to Beats: the volume at which you listen to music. Which artists do you crank up? Who do you play quietly? It even tracks the music you send to Airplay speakers. The songs you use to fill your home are given a different mathematical weight than the songs you use to pass time at work.

But the system doesn’t solely rely on algorithms. It’s also backstopped by a small army of curators and behavioral scientists. This human element is there to help present music that doesn’t simply sound like the music you might enjoy, but also feels like it. Just because you listen to Mumford & Sons doesn’t mean you’d want to listen to a bunch of songs featuring banjos, for instance. You’d probably be more at home listening to Arcade Fire than Earl Scruggs. Humans can help make that determination. Algorithms can’t.

At launch, the app takes all this information and presents a personalized “Just for You” list of albums and playlists. The Influencers’ picks are especially fun. My love for Depeche Mode (especially Violator) was picked up by the service without my direct input. The list is filled with David Bowie, T-Rex, Joy Division, The Ronettes, The Beach Boys, and others. While listening, the connection is suddenly apparent.

All this personalization and curation is the result of input from music producer Jimmy Iovine, a longtime proponent of subscription services, and Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, who is the company’s chief creative officer. Reznor was key in fine-tuning the curation and personalization aspects, but both he and Iovine wanted an experience that resonates with listeners and artists. That includes fixing how the artists’ pages are presented.

When you discover a new band, it can be difficult to determine which of their albums you might enjoy. The app solves this by presenting the essential albums for any given artist. Search the Beach Boys, and you’re shown Pet Sounds and The Smile Sessions, not that horrible Still Cruisin’ album from the late-’80s. Plus, actual album release dates are used instead of the date they were added to the streaming service. This is great when you want to hear 1970s Bowie instead of 1980s Bowie. Yes, there is a difference.

Beats Music won’t have a free tier. It’ll cost $10 a month, with a special for AT&T customers of $15 a month that includes five family members and 10 devices. This is an anomaly in a field where almost every service offers a free way in for listeners. But then, Iovine and Dre were instrumental in convincing people we didn’t need the lousy earbuds that ship with smartphones and music players.

“We know people will pay for something where there is value,” said Rogers. “Enough people pay for headphones, it’s an exciting business. We think we can do the same thing here.”"

Could Beats Music Become The Industry Standard For Digital Downloads?

Can Beats Music become the new industry standard subscription model for a music service?

Find out more on Beats Music from Billboard

"Beats Music, the premium streaming service developed by Trent Reznor, Ian Rogers and the creators of Beats By Dre headphones, is launching on Jan. 21, with AT&T as the exclusive carrier partner, the company said. 

Santa Monica-based Beats will join a parade of competitors, including Rhapsody, Slacker, Xbox Music, Rdio and Sony Music Unlimited -- all vying to become the dominant subscription service in the U.S., the world's largest market for music. The stakes are even higher as the market for digital downloads showed signs of waning, declining in 2013 for the first time, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The field is likely to become even more crowded this year, with Google Inc.'s YouTube and France's Deezer expected to launch their U.S. services in the next several months.

User's Guide: How Beats Music Works

Beats Music, which was built partly from technology acquired in 2012 from the former Mog music service, aims to set itself apart with stylish design and human curation. The company a year ago hired Reznor, of Nine Inch Nails, as its chief creative officer to design the service's look and feel of the service, with the goal of making it easy and fun to use. It also recruited Rogers, former Chief Executive of Topspin Media who also once ran Yahoo's music service, as CEO of Beats Music. And last summer, Beats tapped Julie Pilat, former Clear Channel veteran, to head up Beats' efforts to distinguish itself from the pack with a heavy emphasis on curation via radio-style programming. 

Many other companies have tried similar approaches with much success, most notably Sirius XM and Slacker. Sirius, for example, has cultivated dozens of radio personalities with ardent fan followings, the best example of which is Howard Stern. Its curated approach is partly what makes Sirius XM the country's biggest paid music service, with more than 26 million subscribers. Slacker years ago pioneered the practice of having DJ's program its many genre stations. 

"Our curated stations perform incredibly well, even when listeners have the ability to choose on-demand music," said Slacker's CEO Jim Cady. "Our premium subscribers spend more than 80% of their time listening to our curated stations, rather than creating their own playlists or listening to tracks on demand. We’ve also seen that heavily-curated experiences, like deejay hosted countdown stations, keep people listening up to three times longer than genre stations. Even the simple act of adding a deejay to a station can increase average listening time by nearly 20%." 

With all eyes on streaming music services as a source of future growth for the industry, Beats has ambitious plans to pour on the glamour, as it did with great success for the premium headphones market more than six years ago, leveraging deep relationships cultivated over the years by Beats' co-founder, Jimmy Iovine, the chairman of Interscope Geffen A&M at Universal Music Group. In 2008, Iovine and Dr. Dre launched Beats Electronics. Its instantly recognizeable headphones were soon spotted on dozens of celebrities and rap artists, who extolled the headsets' ability to reproduce the heavy bass sound prevalent in hip hop music. "We built something that works for us, for me, our friends, Dr. Dre," Iovine said in an interview with Billboard. "We enjoy using it. It’s what we would like to have, and we built it to where we felt it could help others."

While Iovine and his executives work to add star power to Beats Music, AT&T Corp. will provide the corporate marketing and distribution muscle. The carrier has agreed to distribute Beats Music, offering AT&T customers a 7-day free trial of the service. Afterwards, the service would cost $9.99 a month. For customers who opt to sign up for AT&T's family bundle, the service would come with a 90-day free trial. Once the trial period runs out, Beats would charge $14.99 a month, but allow up to 5 people and 10 devices full, on-demand access to the service. 

Beats would not disclose the terms of its arrangement with AT&T, including how the cost of licensing music during the free trials would be subsidized. 

For music services, carrier partnerships can be vital. Telecommunications companies such as AT&T have direct billing relationships with millions of subscribers and can tack on the cost of a music service directly on to their customers' cell phone bills. They also have extensive marketing resources that they can use to help push ancillary services, such as music. For AT&T, the benefit is in offering a product that would draw in users who will pay extra for a data plan to accommodate streaming music. 

In addition, Beats has partnered with Target Stores for a promotion that would give away 30-day free trials to customer who buys anything from the store's electronics department. The company has also started tucking vouchers for free trials into Beats Electronics' packaged audio gear. 

What Beats will not be doing anytime soon, however, is offer a free, slimmed-down version of its service -- something that Spotify, Rdio and services have started to do in order to get listeners to try their products in the hopes that they will convert into paying customers. So-called access models, where listeners pay to access large catalogs of music rather than purchase copies of music, is still a small, but growing portion of the industry's revenue. In 2012, it represented 15% of the revenue for music in the U.S., up from 9% in 2011, according to the Recording Industry Association of America, which is set to update this figure in the coming weeks. 

While streaming music is expanding, digital downloads declined on an annual basis for the first time in 2013. Sales of digital tracks fell 5.7% from 1.34 billion units to 1.26 billion units, while digital album sales fell 0.1% to 117.6 million units from 117.7 million a year earlier, according to Nielsen SoundScan."