The announcement was made in a short post on the Beats Music website. Customers will have their subscriptions automatically cancelled on November 30 and the service will not be available past that date.
Apple is making it easy for users to migrate over to Apple Music, its own streaming service it hopes everyone will use now. The contents of subscribers’ libraries and all their playlists will be waiting for them in Apple Music should they choose to switch and transfer their subscription. The option has been available to Beats customers since Apple Music’s launch in June.
Beats Music isn’t being completely killed as it will live on in some sense beneath the surface of Apple Music. The app includes a global radio station branded as Beats 1 and also features curated music lists built by the same “music pros” who formerly worked at Beats.
Apple bought the company in May last year for $3 billion. Beats launched its Spotify-rivalling streaming service in January 2014 and its closure has been expected for some time.
The service wasn’t created from scratch by Beats in the same way Apple used some of its code for Apple Music. Motherboard notes Beats Music is based on a subscription music service known as MOG that received highly positive reviews in the press after its December 2009 launch. Back then, Spotify was 18 months away from arriving in the U.S. and tech journalists came away impressed by the MOG experience.
In 2012, Beats acquired the company for $14 million in a bid to expand its product portfolio and extend onto the Internet. Three years later, MOG is once again evolving to become part of Apple’s expansive reach.
In many ways, Apple Music is just a rebranded, reskinned version of Beats Music. Both services are built around human-curated playlists and personalized recommendations on what to listen to next, incorporating an ethos that considers music an organic experience that machines can’t process on their own.
Apple has no need to maintain two essentially identical products and its own-brand app was always going to come out on top. Beats Music subscribers now have a little over two more weeks of listening left before the beat finally dies out, leaving them deciding between Apple Music, Spotify or other rivals like Pandora and Groove Music.
