Dr Dre's Beats buys MOG
July 8, 2012, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
UPSCALE headphone maker Beats Electronics is buying music subscription service MOG in an attempt to improve what goes into playback devices as much as what comes out of them.
Beats, founded by rapper Dr Dre and recording executive Jimmy Iovine, has devoted its brand to high-quality sound. But headphones and speakers are limited in their ability to improve the sound of songs whose data is compressed to squeeze through narrow pipes like older cellular phone networks.
MOG attracted Beats partly because it encodes song files at 320 kilobits per second, slightly more than Apple Inc's iTunes songs, which are encoded at 256 kbps. MOG serves up songs at higher bit rates when more bandwidth is available, and at lower rates when it isn't.
Beats hopes to use MOG to provide an end-to-end music experience that will help it compete against bigger subscription music rivals like Rhapsody and Spotify.
MOG's paying subscribers are estimated to be in the tens of thousands compared to more than a million for Rhapsody in the US and 3 million for Spotify worldwide.
MOG charges US$10 a month for the ability to choose and play back tracks on mobile devices from more than 15 million songs.
Terms of the deal, which closed on Monday, were not disclosed.
Beats, founded by rapper Dr Dre and recording executive Jimmy Iovine, has devoted its brand to high-quality sound. But headphones and speakers are limited in their ability to improve the sound of songs whose data is compressed to squeeze through narrow pipes like older cellular phone networks.
MOG attracted Beats partly because it encodes song files at 320 kilobits per second, slightly more than Apple Inc's iTunes songs, which are encoded at 256 kbps. MOG serves up songs at higher bit rates when more bandwidth is available, and at lower rates when it isn't.
Beats hopes to use MOG to provide an end-to-end music experience that will help it compete against bigger subscription music rivals like Rhapsody and Spotify.
MOG's paying subscribers are estimated to be in the tens of thousands compared to more than a million for Rhapsody in the US and 3 million for Spotify worldwide.
MOG charges US$10 a month for the ability to choose and play back tracks on mobile devices from more than 15 million songs.
Terms of the deal, which closed on Monday, were not disclosed.
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