It was bound to happen. Now that Apple Music is available on Android, Apple is going to shut down its other music streaming service, Beats Music. The company will automatically cancel all subscriptions on November 30, and remaining users should move to Apple Music.
As a reminder, Apple Music offers all the flagship features of Beats Music. In particular, both services have human-curated playlists with recommendations based on your tastes and listening habits. According to Beats’ support page, recommendations in Apple Music are supposed to be better than in Beats Music.
And of course, there are a few new features in Apple Music, like Beats 1, deep iOS integration, Connect’s mini social network, iTunes support and more.
When existing Beats Music users sign up to Apple Music, their picks and preferences are ported to Apple Music so that they don’t lose anything. But I’d still do it before November 30 so that you can still see your playlists in Beats Music and check if everything was ported over.
Beats Music users also get the same three-month free trial for Apple Music. Apple waited for the Android release before actually shutting down Beats Music, which is a nice move for Android users who were using Beats Music.
When Apple acquired Beats for $3 billion, the company got three different components — Beats speakers and headphones, Beats Music, and Beats executives. Speakers and headphones are still available in the Apple Store, and the company is now even releasing new speakers with a Lightning port.
Beats Music was the software foundation of Apple Music, and in particular the recommendation engine. And former Beats executives, such as Jimmy Iovine, Dr. Dre and Trent Reznor were key to Apple Music’s launch as they had to negotiate deals with music labels for the new service.
At the time of the acquisition, it wasn’t obvious what Apple was really buying. Retrospectively, it’s clear that Apple was already thinking about a music streaming service. TechCrunch first reported the company’s plans to fold Beats Music into iTunes and the Music app on iOS more than a year ago. It is now a done deal.