Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) acquired Beats Music and Beats Electronics for a sum of $3 billion in June 2014. Beats music was one of the well-known streaming music services with a subscription fee. They compete against the likes of Spotify in the sector. Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) buying them would mean that the already available iTunes store in their devices might get a boost with addition of Beats Music service as well. Some recent rumors suggest that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has acquired the UK startup ‘Semetric’, which deals with Musicmetric analytic tool. ‘The Guardian’ article discusses about this rumored acquisition and the reasons behind it.
The article states that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) has acquired UK startup Semetric in an attempt to restart the music streaming subscription service through Beats music in 2015. The article also says that there were a lot of changes like address and management staff of ‘Semetric’, registered in the Companies house, which suggest that Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) now owns ‘Semetric’.
“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plan,” Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) was quoted as said in a statement.
Though ‘Semetric’ did not respond to this rumor. What does this startup possess which attracted the interest from a big firm like Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)? Semetric’s Musicmetric analytics tool basically helps the music industry and labels to track and get data on number of BitTorrent downloads, sales, online viewing through social media, etc. This would help them keep the correct track of the interest around the world for a particular album or song.
‘Semetric’ has raised some funds to expand this service into other sectors like e-books, tvshows, games, etc. All the data gets populated into the Musicmetric dashboard. The startup had also struck a deal with the competitor for Beats Music, Spotify to track the number of streams in Spotify for music labels, which was then added to Musicmetric dashboard.
Musicmetric tool has done some research about piracy in 2012, which pointed out that over 3 billion songs were torrented in first half of that year. This raised many eyebrows in the music industry.
Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is not ready to discuss in public forum on what they intent to do with the startup and its tool. But one would naturally guess from the nature of startup that it is trying to relaunch the Beats Music along with iTunes brand in an effort to take a chunk of market from its main competitor in the sector ‘Spotify’.
With this acquisition Musicmetric dashboard might be embedded into the Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s music tool for tracking the sales and streams of the music labels through iTunes stores and Beats music.
Disclosure: None
Let Warren Buffett, David Einhorn, George Soros, and David Tepper WORK FOR YOU. If you want to beat the low cost index funds by an average of 6 percentage points per year look no further than Warren Buffett’s stock picks. That’s the margin Buffett’s stock picks outperformed the market since 2008. In this free report, Insider Monkey’s market beating research team identified 7 stocks Warren Buffett and 12 other billionaires are crazy about. CLICK HERE NOW for all the details.
