How Apple Beats the Demise of Music Downloads ⇥ jonmaples.com

Jon Maples:

Apple needed to hedge their bets and get into streaming. But instead of building another bolt-on to iTunes as the company did with their underperforming radio service, Apple decided to speed their way to market by purchasing a hot new service that had a lot of buzz, but hadn’t scaled so much that it was prohibitively expensive. Beats is the most viable of all acquisition targets.

Very smart take — the most convincing I’ve seen so far.

If this does pan out, I do wonder if the Beats Android app will continue to exist. I also wonder whether the Beats infrastructure will change. Critically, they do not own their own infrastructure, but rather use MediaNet. I wonder if a post-acquisition Beats will use iTunes as its underlying architecture. Combine these two ideas and, potentially, possibly, maybe, this is a way of bringing iTunes — or, at least, iTunes Music — to Android.