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Beats plans big ad campaign for streaming service launch

By | Published on Thursday 9 January 2014

Beats Music

We’ve heard mixed things about the currently-in-beta Beats Music streaming service, but if the Beats headphones and speakers business has taught us anything, it’s that if you get the branding right you can sell any old shit to idiots.

You don’t need an MBA to know that idiots are a good demographic to tap, because there’s lots of them, and they’ll pay a premium if you can convince them you’re “the business”. You just need to spend a lot of money to make them hear you. And that’s exactly what Beats Music is planning on doing (not that I’m saying the firm’s marketing plan specifically targets idiots, though the people running the company are notably non-idiotic, so it probably does).

According to a New York Post article earlier this week, American consumers can not only expect (as we already knew) to see the Beats digital music platform launch this side of the Grammys, but they’ll almost certainly hear all about it, with a multi-million dollar ad campaign, including something special during the Super Bowl next month, aka the most expensive advertising platform in the known universe.

But if you’ve got the budget, and Beats does, it’s a sensible strategy when you’re launching into a crowded marketplace where the real opportunities probably lie with the consumers yet to embrace streaming music at all, beyond YouTube videos and radio station simulcasts.

Elsewhere in big noise marketing plans, as expected Beats will seemingly launch with a mobile partner in place, in the form of AT&T, while presumably we can expect plenty of celebrity endorsements.

And, having promised to take ‘music discovery’ to a new level, another un-idiotic move by the Beats team is the reported recruitment of a number of key players from the old fashioned radio world, a weirdly untapped resource by the streaming music market to date, even though radio people, for all their sins, are the experts when it comes to programming music for the masses. And for idiots.

So, that’s all exciting, isn’t it? And objective number one for Team Beats, according to one of the Post’s sources? “They’re going to try to blow Spotify out of the water”. Though if they want to dominate the US streaming market, it’s Pandora, YouTube, iTunes Radio and Clear Channel’s iHeartRadio to which they should be aiming their bombs. And beats.



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