Dr Dre to launch Beats Music streaming service

Beats Electronics, the premium headphone brand from hip-hop producer Dr Dre, has set a date for its long-awaited music streaming service as it looks to extend its dominance of the sound system market to online music.

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Beats Music will launch at the end of the month (21 January.)

Beats Music launches later this month (21 January) in the US ahead of a wider roll out to international markets.

The paid for service will be available online or as an app for $10 (£6) a month, with users able to access more than 20 million licensed songs from major record labels including Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group. Tracks can be downloaded for offline listening and similar to other subscription-based services, there are no ads between tracks. It will also include a feature dubbed “Right Now” that lets users create playlists based on location, an activity, a person, mood and genre of music.

The service’s ability to curate music and serve people the right tracks at the right time is how Beats plans to take on established services such as Spotify, Apple’s iTunes Radio and Pandora. Its strategy of using celebrities as influencers will highlight the platform’s benefits alongside an ad at next month’s Super Bowl, according to reports.

In a blog post the company said: “We wanted to build a music service that combined the freedom of an on-demand subscription service – unlimited, uninterrupted streaming and downloads of tens of millions of songs – but layer on top features that would give you that feeling only music that moves you can give.”

Since launching in 2008, the hip-hop mogul’s audio business has amassed a 65 per cent shareof the headphone market, according to retail researcher IDC. The company went on to expand into automotive sound systems and smarpthones created by HTC, which took a stake in Beats Electronics in 2011 that it sold back to the company two years later.

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