Beats Music App To Be Discontinued By Apple

Back in September, there were reports that Apple was planning to shut down Beats Music. At that time, Apple had addressed the reports, categorically denying to discontinue Beats music and instead stating that it might make changes to the Beats brand and the streaming service itself.

But now, it turns out the tech giant will be putting an end to Beats Music after all. Or more accurately, as reported by the Wall Street Journal, Apple will be rebuilding it and relaunching it in 2015 as part of iTunes.

The move certainly makes sense. iTunes's digital music sales have taken a hit recently, with worldwide sales figures decreasing by 13 percent since the beginning of 2013. Downloading songs is clearly not that hot anymore, at least based on how middling iTunes is doing this year so far. Apple knows this and is maybe looking for a way to shift to music streaming services. This is where Beats Music would come in.

With the advent of cloud computing, many music consumers are starting to realize that instead of downloading every new song they fancy, maybe they can just stream it from a music streaming provider, or from their own clouds. Speaking of music streaming providers, the field is certainly beginning to be filled with lots of competition in that department. Indeed, the increasing popularity of Spotify, Google Music, Deezer, and many other music streaming services is proof of that.  

As for Beats Music, it had only acquired about 250,000 subscribers as of May of this year. So instead of investing further in Beats Music, Apple is thinking of merging the music streaming service into iTunes, where there are more than 800 million users, half of whom have their credit card information already registered in Apple's system.

Of course, the tech giant does not need to dominate the music streaming industry. It just needs to establish enough presence (via the new iTunes that features Beats Music streaming) to encourage more people to continue to buy its iPhones and iPads, products which consumers can use to listen to music streaming services. 

Apple had acquired Beats Electronics in May earlier this year for $3 billion. Currently, the music streaming service costs $9.99 every month to subscribe ($99.99 for a whole year subscription). But there are rumors that Apple will be cutting the subscription cost to just $5 every month.