Beats Music Launches January 21st (With Sonos)

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As the story goes, Beats acquired the music streaming service MOG in 2012… and 18 months later, we’re days away from the launch of Beats Music — based on MOG, with custom interface, a few clever new additions, and day 1 availability on Sonos. Of course, the headphone company is banking on their brand to drive subscriptions in a way largely unfamiliar competitors like Rdio can’t. Interestingly, Beats appears to forgo the traditional streaming-only plan in the $4 – $5 range and only offer the $10 ad-free tier, that includes the ability to create and download custom playlists. Further, Beats offers a genre-based presentation and curated playlists – perhaps similar to Slacker, which I’ve successfully replaced Sirius XM with nearly a month ago. Given the small investment of cash, I’ll certainly check Beats Music out for at least month. But luring a percentage of folks like me away from the Spotifys of the world isn’t enough, and I assume their intention is to take this mainstream. And we expect a variety of product and service tie-ins as we’re already seeing with a launch day AT&T family plan.

1 thought on “Beats Music Launches January 21st (With Sonos)”

  1. Well, I’ve been using MOG for a while. Not sure why really, just chose randomly between it and Rdio. I’ve used it for party music, and for playing things my daughter wants to hear (they have a decent selection of Disney soundtrack albums…). Barely worth my money, will see if I continue it after the update. I’ve killed XM in my car because I primarily listen to podcasts, so having something halfway cheap that can stream the music I want (more than Pandora offers) is worth something. And the current iOS app leaves a lot to be desired. We’ll see what the new version looks like I guess.

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