Beats Music enters crowded streaming music market

Update: Beats Music has just announced a delay to the start of its AT&T family plan by five days, citing overwhelming demand for the service. The $15-a-month family plan will begin on Jan 31 instead.

The streaming music business is full of competitors, ranging from Apple iTunes, Spotify, Pandora and even Google Play Music. It’s a vast market with currently many players eyeing for a slice of the pie, though this certainly hasn’t stopped Beats Electronic from jumping into the fray. The company last week unveiled its Beats Music streaming service on Jan 21.

Beats Music offers on-demand streaming similar to most of its competitors such as Spotify, and includes access to over 20 million song and a song-suggestions engine like what you get from Pandora. The service operates on a subscription basis at $10/month for unlimited access. As of now, they have partnered with AT&T to let customers pay their subscription fee with their mobile bill.

As reported by Businessweek, rapper Dr. Dre. Iovine, chairman of the Universal Music Group, strongly believes that Beats Music can be a stand-out service from the rest thanks to the instant recognition of its name and its marketing strategies.

Beats Music features an algorithm that is capable of tracking musical tastes of its users and coming up with new suggested playlists. There’s also a wide variety of playlist suitable for different occasions. Unfortunately, the current US-only status for now isn’t doing the service any favours right from the start.

My tastes varies widely and I don’t personally follow a specific band that I follow. Hence, honestly I won’t mind paying $10 a month for having such service as long as it can really give me good suggestions. Hopefully, Beats Music might eventually tie up with a local Telco to allow us to pay subscription fee through our bills.

New registrations are on hold at the moment due to high volume of interest, according to company CEO Ian Rogers. New users can still sign up but they will be notified again when the service resumes. Beats Music is mitigating backlash by giving everyone an extra week of free trial to try it out (when service resumes, of course).

What are your thoughts about this new player in the streaming sector? Let me know in the comments below.

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