Beats: or how marketing triumphs science and engineering

[PristineSound]

The other thing to keep in mind is that Dr. Dre himself is a cultural icon, he himself is a brand ambassador that carries weight, then using his existing connection, he enlisted other celebrities to become brand ambassadors.

I also argue that those of us in the hobby long enough all heard enough equipment with bad sound to know what good sound is (yeah, the assumption may give too much credit to some people). But these celebrities who are brand ambassadors for Beats couldn't tell ass from tail what good sound should be, they hear a lot of bass from a product that a famous rapper and music producer "created", and it just made them wet in their pants thinking it's the greatest sound ever. Not to mentioned, these celebrity brand ambassadors get to be associated with a cultural icon, which in return elevate their brand so association.

If Beats wasn't started with someone like Dr. Dre. I am doubtful it would be as much of a commercial success as it was.

I would give brands like McIntosh, Bower & Wilkins and yes Bose at its heyday much more credit for their marketing prowess.

 

[kemmler3D]

I would give brands like McIntosh, Bower & Wilkins and yes Bose at its heyday much more credit for their marketing prowess.

Professionally speaking I don't totally agree.

McIntosh and B&W I mostly give credit to in terms of channel strategy / management (i.e. keeping salespeople and reviewers happy. Does take some skill.) The scale and scope of these brands was and is very limited compared to Beats. They never went truly mainstream.

Bose was / is good at mainstream marketing but I wouldn't say they were innovative or game-changing in that regard. They essentially used the same playbook as any other product or appliance brand, invested a lot, and executed well. A very solid case study of 20th century marketing strategy and tactics, but no strokes of genius.

As a marketer, I hate to admit it, but I think Beats took it to another level. The lynchpin was Dr. Dre himself, but seeing the opportunity to do a celebrity-led audio brand and grow it so quickly was kinda brilliant. Nothing about the approach was completely new, but it was akin to launching Air Jordans at Nike - a very unique opportunity to capitalize on cultural capital that is only obvious in hindsight. Approaching headphones as a fashion accessory that happens to play music was also game-changing, especially compared to e.g. Bose. They got a lot of things right that had no direct precedent in audio, and are not super common in consumer products in general.

I totally understand why people say "Bah, it's all marketing" about Beats - (arguably totally true until Apple bought them and improved the sound) but in my line of work it's also fascinating what they were able to pull off.

 

[early rejecter]

Sales exploded and the company became so valuable that Apple paid $3 billion for them. Unlike Apple's other acquisitions (e.g. Siri and Q.ai), Beats had no proprietary technology, all they had was their brand name. Yet Apple still saw fit to pay billions of dollars for the company…

…As an enthusiast, it boggles my mind that Apple paid $3 billion for basically an empty shell created out of nothing through the power of marketing.

Haven’t watched the video so I don’t know if it is addressed, but the understanding at the time was that Apple was acquiring Beats for its streaming music service to help jumpstart Apple Music, not primarily for its headphone business.

 

[pablolie]

I'd never buy a Beats product, and decided that pre-Apple acquisition.

However I think it's silly to vilify them. Clearly many users loved the exaggerated bass, and they quickly became a big name... and their customers seem happy. It's market economy, not a dictature of the wise. And every consumer product requires marketing, otherwise it'll die quietly waiting for a buyer. Marketing is not evil. And calling all consumers ignorant and stupid is also silly. We all know market economy doesn't always serve the betterment of the world. Fads exist.

 

[pablolie]

... As a marketer, I hate to admit it, but I think Beats took it to another level. The lynchpin was Dr. Dre himself, but seeing the opportunity to do a celebrity-led audio brand and grow it so quickly was kinda brilliant. ...

They did in no way invent celebrity marketing. I was in a class that used Lili Langtrey (?) selling some soap brand as a much earlier example. And Dre was by far not the only celebrity promoting beats (although he was a shareholder, I think), there were Lebron and Serena and many, many others wearing their Beats.

 

[kemmler3D]

They did in no way invent celebrity marketing. I was in a class that used Lili Langtrey (?) selling some soap brand as a much earlier example. And Dre was by far not the only celebrity promoting beats (although he was a shareholder, I think), there were Lebron and Serena and many, many others wearing their Beats.

Of course celebrity-driven brands and endorsements weren't new (they probably date back to Roman times, who knows?) but it seems like they realized Dr. Dre's reputation could specifically carry that strategy farther and faster in the headphone category than anyone might have expected. So to me, that was a bit brilliant.

Similarly, there are tons of basketball players who should have credibility endorsing shoes. Anyone in the NBA should know something about basketball shoes. But only Michael Jordan had the profile to turn a "shoe endorsement" into a global fashion brand. It's the same tactic but with a decidedly different character.

It also wasn't really at the height of his fame (arguably it was when 2001 was released) so I imagine some kind of flash of insight was involved. As @beeface mentions, there are a handful of producers even from the same genre and era that could have put their name on headphones. But it's hard to imagine "Beats by Timbaland" doing anything in the market. Maybe they just got lucky, and I'm romanticizing ex post facto, I dunno.

People have GENERALLY done tons of celebrity-linked audio products and I can't name any off the top of my head because nobody cared. Realizing that people would care specifically about Dr. Dre selling headphones was pretty smart IMO. Or at least it appears that way now.

 

[Mr. Swordfish]

A couple of PCs ago I bought an HP desktop that came with Beats audio as part of the package. I disabled Beats because it sounded like crap. But:

1. Every time the system updated, it would re-enable Beats
2. When you manually disabled Beats, it had the side effect of changing the system EQ to turn the bass all the way down. So, I didn't just have to disable beats, I also had to un-fuck the system EQ. And anyone who didn't also do this would think that the system sounded bad without Beats. Because it did.

I returned that PC fairly quickly, and my opinion of Beats is that it's sleazy crapware that I will never go near. It was HP's second chance after swearing "never again" several years earlier. Both brands are way at the end of the Z list.

As for Bose, I was willing to buy a car with a Bose system, but mainly because I figured it was probably made by Harmon with the Bose logo simply pasted on.

 

[Robin L]

I was working at the Fresno IRS Campus when Beats took off. A lot of IRS work is data input, most of the members of the NTEU are seasonal, part-time employees, peak season meant a lot of energy drinks, habitual multitasking and hours of overtime at time and a half and under pressure, double time. Good times if you're up to it. Headphone/earbud use was encourged to help prevent 'side talk', which happened anyway. Up and down the .2 mile hallway of the gated campus one would find folks wearing audio headgear of various sorts, pride of place was for Beats.

I was keen on the "audiophile" aspects of the hobby, buying FiiO's portable music players and portable headphone amps along with too many headphones. Seems as though wireless headphones were incoming meaning that wired head 'phones were on the way out. I had a pair of Sony V-6s for years, a pretty good headphone for certain uses. Gave them to a charming middle-age mama wearing a Metallica t-shirt she got at a concert. I got several pairs of Sennheiser headphones, most around half-price. I've already given away most of those headphones, they were taking up space, not getting used.

My current default for 'headphones' are the Drop 6XXs, but I honestly prefer the $25 Crinicle Zero Two IEMs to any 'real' headphones. What the Zero-Twos do that the Beats should have done is go all the way to the very bottom with a slight lift in the bottom-most octaves. What the Beats do sounds like a bit too much upper bass/lower midrange boost, which results in boom but also obscures a lot of what's going on everywhere else. Whatever, the big Beats wireless set is sonically innocuous and almost neutral, which is easier for long-term listening than a lot of other options. One could do a whole lot worse.

 

[pablolie]

...
People have GENERALLY done tons of celebrity-linked audio products and I can't name any off the top of my head because nobody cared. Realizing that people would care specifically about Dr. Dre selling headphones was pretty smart IMO. Or at least it appears that way now.

All true. I also seem to recall that Dre had moved on into entrepreneurship rather than being a rapper at the time. He didn't have to turn himself into a somewhat odd household mascot like Snoop (from murder gangsta to Martha Stewart lapdogg) as he aged. So Dre probably was able to recruit all the celebs that sported Beats (and there were many)... and Beats were not just audio equipment, they were a fashion accessory. It was all very cleverly marketed.

And the marketing didn't falsify the product, and we know 95% of audio buyers didn't and still don't care much about reading specs or understanding Harman stuff etc etc. Nothing new under the sun. It seemed to give people what they wanted, and people often consume garbage with enthusiasm.

 

[Mr. Swordfish]

it was akin to launching Air Jordans at Nike...

I mistakenly bought a pair of Nike golf shoes once. That was before I learned that Nike doesn't make shoes, they just slap their logo on whatever crap they can get somebody else to make for cheap. And, yes, the shoes with the Nike logo that pro athletes use are not the same crap, but I don't think they are made by Nike either.

Probably the worst pair of shoes I've ever owned.

 

[mglobe]

There is no doubt that the late Professor Amar Bose knew his stuff. Some of Bose's products may be some solid science behind them (e.g. their noise cancellation headphones), but Bose also "educates" consumers this will serve all their needs for a home theater, which defies physics.

Wasn’t Bose early to market in bringing pretty good sound in forms that worked for the non-enthusiast crowd? The Wave Radio, and its successors allowed people to get better sound than they were getting out of table top radios by a long shot. And the sub-satellite systems brought “subwoofer” technology to folks who had never heard of of it before. Also allowed them to have a relatively non-intrusive and ok sounding system in their living rooms. I think they were innovators. Maybe not for what folks on this site find of value, but for a lot of people their products (expensive for what they were) gave them options they really didn’t have at the time they were introduced. I’m fine with being corrected if my memory is not serving me right in terms of what similar product to Wave and the sub-satellite systems were available at the time. Not everyone is looking for ultimate sound (or would recognize it for that matter). Someone needs to serve that market.

 

[Robin L]

This video talks about the history of Beats headphones. How they came from nothing, did no research, optimized their product to deliver a bass heavy response (because that made music sound more exciting) and then invested a lot of money into marketing. Sales exploded and the company became so valuable that Apple paid $3 billion for them. Unlike Apple's other acquisitions (e.g. Siri and Q.ai), Beats had no proprietary technology, all they had was their brand name. Yet Apple still saw fit to pay billions of dollars for the company. For context, Samsung paid $8 billion for the Harman Group - a company that has a dozen smaller brands under its umbrella, wrote the textbook on speaker and headphone engineering, and it actually has patents!

As the video points out, most serious audiophiles regard Beats with the same disdain we reserve for Bose. We KNOW that it's cheaply made and inaccurate. We cling to our Sennheisers, Beyerdynamics, AKG's, and Dan Clarks. But look where those companies are: AKG belongs to Samsung as part of the Harman group, Sennheiser is up for sale, Beyerdynamic has been acquired by the Chinese (for USD$140 million!!), and DCA is an absolute minnow.

There is a difference between enthusiasts and audio companies. We are in it for the sound. Audio companies are in it for the money. As an enthusiast, it boggles my mind that Apple paid $3 billion for basically an empty shell created out of nothing through the power of marketing. But then, those Apple guys are much smarter than I am. Or maybe more cynical. I guess the consumer gets what they deserve.

So all you guys who care about compliance to the Harman target: you're all wrong. Sean Olive was wasting his time. If you want to make money, forget the Harman curve and forget science. Go find yourself a rapper, get a product designer to give you a cool logo and cool looking headphones, invest all your money in marketing, and make bank. History tells us that perception trumps reality, and it trumps it big. To the tune of $3 billion for Beats.

Couldn't finish the video. This could have been wrapped up in 10 minutes—hell, this could have been an e-mail. Whatever this dude thinks, the concept of a "serious audiophile community manufacturing tradition" sounds to me like something better used a fertilizer. Or maybe in some audiophile journal.

 

[pablolie]

Couldn't finish the video. This could have been wrapped up in 10 minutes—hell, this could have been an e-mail. Whatever this dude thinks, the concept of a "serious audiophile community manufacturing tradition" sounds to me like something better used a fertilizer. Or maybe in some audiophile journal.

Or... to quote Dre.. "it's like this and like that and like this... and uuuh"

 

[mhardy6647]

Say what you will about Bose—and I know all of you will—but any company that has a speaker system like this:

View attachment 539350

deserves a tiny bit of respect.

From the graveyard of ancient audio, (the real) Altec chuckles.

That's 16... count 'em, sixteen Altec 288 compression drivers.
Sensitivity of a (single) typical, early (AlNiCo) 288 was ca. 115 dB at four feet (sorry, very Amurrican in those days) per 1 watt input (24 ohm nominal impedance).
E.g., from http://alteclansingunofficial.nlenet.net/proloudspeakers/lgdriverslit.html

 

[Axo1989]

Haven’t watched the video so I don’t know if it is addressed, but the understanding at the time was that Apple was acquiring Beats for its streaming music service to help jumpstart Apple Music, not primarily for its headphone business.

Absolutely.

The video appears to be created with the dreaded generative tools, and manages some hilarious segues between the repetitive/tedious narrative and some descriptions-for-the-visually-impaired whenever faced with an image and not much else to say. I managed 18 minutes, by which time it did indeed cover Beats streaming platform and straightforward benefits of same to Apple, although not succinctly or with correct emphasis.

... As an enthusiast, it boggles my mind that Apple paid $3 billion for basically an empty shell created out of nothing through the power of marketing. But then, those Apple guys are much smarter than I am. Or maybe more cynical. I guess the consumer gets what they deserve.

No, Beats wasn't an empty shell, it was a successful audio fashion business, with comprehensive corporate knowledge of music and entertainment industry connections, and a streaming platform with some very serviceable features. Apple bought it for those reasons, in reverse order.

While Apple turned the music industry on its head with iTunes, 99c tracks and 'rip, mix, burn' those strategies were losing efficacy as streaming took over global listening habits. This article is a better and more concise summary than the over-long video.

... Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty calculated that average spending per iTunes account dropped 24% year over year in early 2014, landing at just $3.29 per account in the first quarter. Apple needed a way into the subscription streaming business, and building one from scratch would take time it didn’t have.

Beats Music, the streaming service Beats had launched in January 2014, gave Apple a ready-made platform with curated playlists, licensing deals already in place, and a team that understood how to package music for listeners who didn’t want to buy individual songs anymore. Rather than compete against Spotify with an untested product, Apple acquired the infrastructure and expertise to leapfrog the development process.

Note also that the $3 billion price paid was actually $2.6 billion plus retention—$400 million in vesting shares for Dre and Iovine, because it was worth that much to Apple to keep them on. And a good price for Iovine's Rolodex.

Jimmy Iovine had spent nearly 25 years running Interscope Records, signing artists like Eminem and Gwen Stefani, and building relationships across the entire music industry. He and Dr. Dre joined Apple as senior advisors to the content division. Iovine brought something Apple’s engineers couldn’t replicate: deep, personal relationships with artists, labels, and managers that would prove essential when negotiating exclusive content and convincing the industry to support a new streaming platform.

Iovine had also been ahead of the curve on streaming’s potential. He reportedly pushed Steve Jobs to adopt a subscription model instead of per-song pricing as early as 2003. His instinct for where the music business was heading gave Apple a creative leader who could bridge the gap between Silicon Valley and the recording industry. As one colleague put it, Iovine “can see around corners.”

Apple announced the Beats acquisition in May 2014, and Apple Music launched just 13 months later.

The acquisition’s clearest long-term payoff came in June 2015, when Apple launched Apple Music. The new service was built on the foundation Beats Music had laid, incorporating its curation approach, its playlist philosophy, and much of its team. Beats Music subscribers were transitioned to Apple Music at the end of that year, with Apple promising better recommendations and new features like Beats 1, a 24/7 global radio station.

Apple Music grew rapidly, eventually reaching tens of millions of subscribers and becoming the primary competitor to Spotify worldwide. Without the Beats acquisition, Apple would have entered the streaming race years later and without the music industry relationships needed to secure licensing deals quickly.

I remember the launch publicity well, even though as an Australian with different music tastes neither Dre nor Iovine meant much to me. Looking at the acquisition through the audio tech lens alone doesn't tell a fraction of the story.

 

[Roland68]

This video talks about the history of Beats headphones. How they came from nothing, did no research, optimized their product to deliver a bass heavy response (because that made music sound more exciting) and then invested a lot of money into marketing. Sales exploded and the company became so valuable that Apple paid $3 billion for them. Unlike Apple's other acquisitions (e.g. Siri and Q.ai), Beats had no proprietary technology, all they had was their brand name. Yet Apple still saw fit to pay billions of dollars for the company. For context, Samsung paid $8 billion for the Harman Group - a company that has a dozen smaller brands under its umbrella, wrote the textbook on speaker and headphone engineering, and it actually has patents!

As the video points out, most serious audiophiles regard Beats with the same disdain we reserve for Bose. We KNOW that it's cheaply made and inaccurate. We cling to our Sennheisers, Beyerdynamics, AKG's, and Dan Clarks. But look where those companies are: AKG belongs to Samsung as part of the Harman group, Sennheiser is up for sale, Beyerdynamic has been acquired by the Chinese (for USD$140 million!!), and DCA is an absolute minnow.

There is a difference between enthusiasts and audio companies. We are in it for the sound. Audio companies are in it for the money. As an enthusiast, it boggles my mind that Apple paid $3 billion for basically an empty shell created out of nothing through the power of marketing. But then, those Apple guys are much smarter than I am. Or maybe more cynical. I guess the consumer gets what they deserve.

So all you guys who care about compliance to the Harman target: you're all wrong. Sean Olive was wasting his time. If you want to make money, forget the Harman curve and forget science. Go find yourself a rapper, get a product designer to give you a cool logo and cool looking headphones, invest all your money in marketing, and make bank. History tells us that perception trumps reality, and it trumps it big. To the tune of $3 billion for Beats.

Exactly—Apple had no interest whatsoever in the Beats headphones themselves, but rather in the fully developed, functional streaming platform known today as Apple Music.
Added to this was their immense reach—particularly among the younger generation and across the entire sports sector—as well as extensive contacts and contracts within the music industry.

 

[whereisbrian]

Bose was characterized by:
Massive patent filings
An aggressive approach to defending them and numerous lawsuits against detractors and magazines to silence criticism
A lot of advertising
With disappointing sound quality

 

[Sokel]

The nihilistic, engineering mind can't go past necessity or usefulness, the bare minimum is a triumph on their side.
But they forget the world. Who runs on emotion, trends, and genius marketing.

I hate analogies but can't help it. Take sports for example. What necessity do they represent? Yet, they fill stadiums, etc.
Even music. Is it a necessity?

There's a reason that the marketing studies at some Universities are so expensive.

 

[Axo1989]

Couldn't finish the video. This could have been wrapped up in 10 minutes—hell, this could have been an e-mail. Whatever this dude thinks, the concept of a "serious audiophile community manufacturing tradition" sounds to me like something better used a fertilizer. Or maybe in some audiophile journal.

Looking at another video on that channel (about Nakamichi) there are all the signs of generative slop, in visual construction as well as narrative. The latter being quite tedious. A ‘be more concise’ prompt wouldn’t have gone astray. And many of the oddly inserted image descriptions for the visually impaired are even more hilariously inaccurate, describing … different images.

I guess that’s also a weakness with YouTube’s tagging of generative content: images collected and sequenced and possibly modified rather than fully generated, and narrative written but not necessarily spoken by bot scrapes under the radar?

 

[EJ3]

A couple of PCs ago I bought an HP desktop that came with Beats audio as part of the package. I disabled Beats because it sounded like crap. But:

1. Every time the system updated, it would re-enable Beats
2. When you manually disabled Beats, it had the side effect of changing the system EQ to turn the bass all the way down. So, I didn't just have to disable beats, I also had to un-fuck the system EQ. And anyone who didn't also do this would think that the system sounded bad without Beats. Because it did.

I returned that PC fairly quickly, and my opinion of Beats is that it's sleazy crapware that I will never go near. It was HP's second chance after swearing "never again" several years earlier. Both brands are way at the end of the Z list.

As for Bose, I was willing to buy a car with a Bose system, but mainly because I figured it was probably made by Harmon with the Bose logo simply pasted on.

I replaced the BOSE speakers in my 2004 Chevy Silverado (and before that, someone had replaced the pre-equed head unit that powered them with a nice [very flexible use] Pioneer CD/DVD/Bluetooth/Hands free phone connection system with a great hidden microphone).
I would do that in my wife's 2024 Subaru CrossTrek but the BOSE CRAPPY SOUND SYSTEM is too integrated into the cars computer system. One of the many reasons that we won't have another Subaru
Subaru: no back seat A/C (the truck does), cruise control that gently slows down to the under the spped limit car in front of you so that you don't realize that you've slowed down until you've been behind him for 5 minutes while cars in the left lane are going by you (when, if it warned you that the car was slower, then you'd have gone on around, too). The truck warns you by your approach speed, you know that what is in front of you is slower than you and you automatically prepare to go into the left lane to go around the rolling road block obstacle. Backing up, the Subaru slams on the brakes when the obstacle is 2.5 feet off to the side of the car, making you think that you hit something.
No seat position memory for other drivers (my wife is a lot smaller than me). Cars have had that since the 1970's). No electrically adjustable passenger seat available.
And many more stupid electronic/computer things (some of which I have managed to defeat). Like the auto stop/start that puts a lot of wear an tear on your engine itself, the starter/alternator (and the rest of the electrical system. Defeated now. The seatbelt warning that goes of when you are just moving the car a foot or 2 (or driving through your lawn), which quickly becomes very loud (it also shuts the stereo sound off). Defeated. Car hits the brakes when you are turning into an intersection in heavy traffic with someone letting you in because the person letting you in is to close, according to the cars lidar system, causing you to get hit from the side and the rear. And it is your cars fault.
NEVER again SUBARU.
Too much integrated, non-adsjustable range SAFETY CRAP that causes accidents.
Oh, apples on trees in an orchard 9when you are driving between the trees on a track between them) causes it's eyesite system to disable the car from being able to move because there is something in the way, according to the eyesite system. Yep, wonderful POS for off road.
Sorry, I started with the Bose Junk and couldn't stop about the other junk to do with the cars programing. I guess that it's good for some people.
But, if some people need those things to feel safe...
I have questions about physical, mental acuity tests and drivers licensing requirements.
Sorry about the rant that started with Bose taking over the cars sound (in & of itself, bad enough to warent never again buying) a Subaru.

Bose was characterized by:
Massive patent filings
An aggressive approach to defending them and numerous lawsuits against detractors and magazines to silence criticism
A lot of advertising
With disappointing sound quality

And the backing of a man with a PHD. and a "wholesome" University behind him.
I heard that once a-pon a time, Amar Bose saw Paul Klipsch at an event the were attending and Amar yelled to the wall, Hello, Paul! And that Paul positioned himself near Amar, cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled "Hello, Amar".
Reflective sound VS Direct sound.
(to me, anyway), true or not!