Beats recently-announced acquisition of music streaming service MOG cost the music peripheral company $14 million. The deal was announced yesterday, and it was apparently negotiated in part by phone maker HTC, which owns a portion of Beats. The deal will see parts of MOG coming under direct control of Beats, while other aspects of the company will remain relatively autonomous.
Beats Electronics has announced that it has completed its long rumored acquisition of MOG music, reports USA Today. Terms of the deal have not been made public, although negotiations were known to have started as far back as March. Beats, which is part owned by HTC and forms an integral part of their smartphone lineup, plans on making the MOG music experience part of its end-to-end music experience.
The long-rumored acquisition of digital music service MOG by Beats may have been finalized and could be announced in the near future. A source familiar with the workings of the deal has told CNet that the deal has indeed gone through. Despite the news, particulars in the acquisition have yet to be revealed.
In its first endeavor away from American shores, subscription music service MOG announced an exclusive partnership with Telstra, one of the largest telecom companies in Australia. The deal will give bring access to MOG's music catalog to Telstra's more than 13.3 million mobile customers.
HTC in an interview Friday said it won't pack in Beats Audio's earbuds or other headphones with at least some of its smartphones from now on. Product executive Martin Fichter briefed CNET that, while the on-device Beats Audio processing would stay, ordinary headphones at most would come in the box with models like the Evo 4G LTE and One series. Customers weren't buying for the headphones and thus didn't justify the extra cost.
Beats Audio co-creator Jimmy Iovine gave some of the first signs of a possible buyout of MOG in an interview on Wednesday. Although stopping short of confirming the deal directly, he mentioned to Bloomberg that Beats was "looking at this area." His company wouldn't try to encroach on iTunes' pay-per-track formula, which was largely secure, but saw a deficit in the subscription field.
On the heels of its Windows app, MOG has quietly posted a native iPad app (App Store). Although marked as 2.0.2, the previously unavailable app is a significant rethink with a more visual interface with pop-overs that expand options for playing, sharing, and queuing. Going into an album, artist or other broader category provides a more detailed exploration of the content while keeping always-available playback controls.
Mog has posted a new app for Windows desktop owners. With it, subscribers can listen to music from the music service's catalog of over 14 million songs on their windows PC as well as their mobile device or Mac. The app features a native audio decoder for improved audio playback quality.
Beats Audio's increasingly corroborated acquisition of MOG is now thought by sources to have not only been completed but ultimately a shell operation. The anonymous insiders near MOG told GigaOM that MOG had sold for just under $12 million. Although Beats made the purchase itself, it was HTC funding the deal, according to claims.
Beats Audio's rumored takeover of MOG could be the foundation of a very different approach by HTC to reviving its cloud music aims. A rumor emerging Tuesday had unnamed Digitimes sources anticipating an HTC service launching in the second half of 2012, with partly-owned Beats handling the brunt of the service. Unlike the one-time HTC Listen service, it would be a "cross-platform, cross-device" option.
Partly HTC-owned Beats Audio was rumored Monday to have bought MOG. A single source for Business Insider claimed a quiet deal had been struck last week with no mention of terms. While unverified, MOG was unusually non-committal on whether or not it had been acquired, saying only that it was open to deals.
Spotify has already reached three million paying subscribers, the company's US managing director Ken Parks gave out in a discussion Thursday [free reg. required]. The benchmark number given to the FT was triple the million from a year ago and saw it growing much faster than before, having reached two million in September and 2.5 million in November. The three million now represented a larger 20 percent portion of the base and didn't include those who were just part of free trials.
The IFPI in its latest study (PDF) saw an eight percent upswing in digital music revenue in 2011. The increase is the first it claimed to have had since 2004 and lines up with an American rebound in overall album sales. They were important enough for online content to represent 32 percent of the industry association's combined business versus 29 percent in 2010.
Spotify's Wednesday special event will be all about adding an app-like platform, according to new details. An "app finder" would come to the jukebox app, the Wall Street Journal said, and let users add functionality to the normally barebones software. Mimicking the iOS App Store, it would bring in third-party developers but would see apps vetted for compatibility and "other criteria."
Spotify's special event on Wednesday may related to third-party app support. Inside updates relayed to AllThingsD revealed that Spotify had been talking with developers about making its music library available to any app as long as it's accessed through a $10 monthly Spotify Premium account. The streaming audio is already available through third-party devices like Sonos boxes, but implementations are usually tied to special hardware deals.
Streaming music services MOG, Rdio, and Spotify have shot back at distributors and artists leaving in a new response. MOG chief David Hyman put the blame the most directly on labels, telling Fast Company that paid revenue from subscription music was a "black hole" that he couldn't control. If a label paid an artist poorly, it was that label's responsibility to improve its internal relationship, he implied.
BMW and MINI have announced that both brands will get MOG streaming from iPhones. MOG offers users over 13 million songs on demand and includes unique features such artist-only stations. The service is now integrated into all 2011 BMWs with the BMW Apps option as well as MINI Connected infotainment systems via the MOG app (free, iTunes) for iPhone.
Logitech gave owners of its long-serving Squeezebox music hubs an update Tuesday for MOG's online audio. The addition lets listeners stream on-demand from MOG's whole catalog at 320Kbps, at the higher end of the compressed audio most listen to. It joins Napster and Spotify among the choices for unlimited music on the devices.
Barnes & Noble is planning to drop its claims of focusing only on reading and attack the tablet market more directly, a slew of leaks confirmed to Android Central late Thursday. Its November 7 event will see it roll out the Nook Tablet, the rumored high-end model. Although it will still have the Nook Color's heavily customized Android interface, it will carry a much faster dual-core, 1.2GHz TI OMAP processor with 1GB of RAM, similar to Motorola's Xoom 2, and 16GB of storage with a microSDHC slot.
Facebook continued its string of news at f8 by detailing its media sharing. Part of a new system of verbs that replace the generic Like, it focuses most on music: users can spot someone listening to a song in the live ticker and start listening to the same track. Services will still need to launch the separate app if it exists, but the method will let anyone listen to similar content if it exists in a subscription service.
Facebook's music service launching tomorrow will have a unique live social listening option between friends. Creative director Ji Lee briefly tweeted and promptly pulled word of a "listen with your friend" feature in the ticker, which was just added to Facebook on Wednesday. In mentioning that it was "live," he implied that users could click a currently active song and at least launch the same song in a valid subscription service, if not sync it to the same time marker.
Facebook's media plans will be scaled down when they finally show at f8 on Thursday, insiders uncovered Tuesday afternoon. Instead of playing on Facebook through a central hub, listeners or viewers will have to launch an outside app. It will still carry over information and use a Facebook sign-on, but AllThingsD understood it would still have to open the third-party app when relevant, such as with Spotify.
Facebook's imminent music service should include more partners than thought. New code exploration from Yvo Schaap has shown that Rhapsody, Deezer, Soundcloud, and Vevo will join those known to be part of the service. MOG, Rdio, and Spotify had been the only services identified before.
The upcoming Facebook music service many expect at the f8 conference on September 22 could have a unique integration between rival providers. A leak Saturday indicated it would have "content resolution" that would guarantee access to songs as long as someone had least one of the partner services. An Rdio user sharing a song would automatically make a link to MOG or Spotify, TechCrunch gave as one example.
Facebook's f8 conference next month is now very likely to include its rumored major music initiative, tipsters disclosed Wednesday. The service would be more of an aggregator and merge Spotify, MOG, Rdio, and other streaming music to play them through a central area on the social network. A pair of sources for Mashable made clear once again that this wouldn't involve direct hosting.
Boxee has added MOG's instant music streaming services to the media selection now available with its set-top box. The addition will offer subscribing Boxee owners a pick of over 11 million songs from its catalog. All are available in higher quality than usual 320Kbps streams.
Three music industry executives leaked out Friday that the US Spotify launch had gotten off to a fast start. The streaming music service already had 70,000 Premium, $10 monthly subscribers as of its first week, Bill Werde said outside of his usual Billboard position. It's unknown if the data is discounting those who got limited-run Premium accounts.
Sonos' plans for its Play:3 network radio were mostly given away Monday after the discovery of a brief Amazon listing (cached). While it didn't settle the name, the post confirmed that it would be a shrunk version of the ZonePlayer S5 with three drivers, two of which would be mid-range while the third would be a tweeter for the high range. Deep bass may still be a selling point with a bass radiator to push the low end.
Spotify has publicly hinted that it will finally launch is long expected streaming music service in July. The most successful platform of its kind in Europe with over one million paid subscribers, Spotify has now landed the remaining deals it with record companies necessary to launch the service in the US. "We're signing the remaining deals as I speak," said Spotifiy’s Jonathan Forster talking to media in London. Forster added that "We won't launch before July 5.”
As expected, the MOG music service is now available on connected home gear from Sonos. The 320kbps, ad-free MOG streams are available on an on-demand basis or from a customized station. All Sonos customers in the US are getting a 14-day trial of MOG on Sonos.
Roku made one of its biggest pushes into retail on Wednesday and landed a key deal with Best Buy. The big-box stores will carry the mid-range Roku XD both in retail and online. The move represents the first time one of the company's networked media hubs is available at stores across the US without a forced rebranding.
The MOG music service available for Android- and iOS-based devices will now come to Sonos in-home music systems, connected Vizio TVs, portable electronics from LG and Samsung and new Mini cars. The new Sonos partnership gives users streaming for the 320Kbps, ad-free service over its multi-room audio systems. Access includes MOG's Mobius music discovery engine and more than 10 million songs.
MOG today launched its mobile app and matching service for both Android devices and iOS (free, App Store). The monthly subscription is billed as one of the most complete of its kind and lets listeners both stream music as well as download it, either as part of a recommendation-based radio feed or on demand. Listeners can create playlists on the phone or the web and sync them between the two, and downloads can scale from a 2G-friendly 64Kbps to as much as 320Kbps to preserve quality.
MOG's streaming music service is finally set to arrive on the iPhone and Roku player. The iPhone app was recently approved, but only after being stalled in the App Store approval process for more than a month. Earlier previews indicate the app will allow users to download entire albums and create radio stations automatically filled with content similar to certain artists on songs.
The on-demand and online music service MOG on Monday announced the upcoming release of its MOG All Access app for smartphones. Initially, the app will be available for Android-powered devices as well as iPhones. These versions of the app will launch in the spring, likely April and the service will cost $10 per month. The subscription will also allow users to access the service from their desktop or notebook PCs, and has no data limits.
