In six years, Interscope records mogul Jimmy Iovine and hip-hop icon Dr. Dre have turned Beats by Dr. Dre headphones into a $1 billion-plus business. Now, together with new president and former Interscope executive Luke Wood, they're faced with a new challenge: taking a hot brand and making beats by dre black friday
it, you might say, even hotter. Iovine had been hanging out in the editing room with James' friend and business partner Maverick Carter during the development of a documentary on the basketball star. "Mav called me back and says, 'LeBron wants 15.'"
To that end, Beats Electronics has introduced portable and wireless speakers, co-branded smartphones¡ªand in January it even launched a new streaming music service, Beats Music, to compete with the likes of Spotify. Beats Electronics, despite some ferocious competition, still controls almost 70 percent of the market for premium headphones. For that it Cheap Beats By Dre
can thank lightning-fast marketing and an unbeatable grasp of pop culture. Iovine and Wood explain how they and Dr. Dre pulled it off¡ªand what they have to do to stay on top.
"We got dumped on by audiophiles on Day One," says Iovine. Beats headphones weren't tuned evenly, like the usual high-end headphones. They were tuned to make the music sound more dramatic. Iovine adds: "We wanted to recreate that excitement of being in the studio. That's why people listen." But skeptics also wondered why anybody would pay $200 for headphones when you got the cheap beats by dre solo
earbuds for nothing. "I was like, 'Bad audio is free,'" Iovine says. "When you believe in something, the last thing you say to yourself is, Well, no one's doing this, so there must be no good reason to do it."
When developing the first Beats headphones, Iovine would lay out various prototypes in his Interscope offices and then poll everyone who came to see him. "It was this incredible parade of the world's great artists," says Wood. "M.I.A. or Pharrell Williams or Gwen Stefani or Will.i.am would come around, and I'd ask 1028mkQSA them beats by dre solo black
, 'What do you think of this one? What about this? What about that?'" says Iovine. "It's not a numbers thing. I go to people with great taste." As he and Dre prepared to launch the final version of Beats, Iovine sent a pair to another world-famous guy: LeBron James.