Beats Electronics for Clearer Audios

Beats Electronics LLC is an American audio equipments manufacturer. Beats was founded by Andre “Dr. Dre” Young, a hip-hop producer, and Jimmy Lovine who once served as chairman of Interscope-Geffen-A&M Records. The company’s most popular brand is the Beats by Dr. Dre.

In its promotions, Beats alleged that most audio equipments do not allow listeners to hear “all” the music. With Beats by Dr. Dre headphones, the listener could “hear what the artists hear and listen to the music the way they should.” Beats also licensed its Beats Audio brand and its technologies to other manufacturers. Hewlett Packard offered PCs equipped with Beats Audio systems in 2011. Since then, all of HP’s laptops, desktops and tablets are equipped with the Beats Audio system.

Since 2009, Beats is manufacturing its products under license by Monster Cable, a consumer electronics company. However, by the end of its five-year contract in 2012, Beats decided not to renew its license with Monster Cable and opted to manufacture its own products until today. Monster has been reaching its market demographically.

The mobile phone manufacturer HTC acquired majority of the shares of Beats, representing 50.1% of the stakes in August 2010 for $309 million. Subsequently, 25% of the shares were sold back to Young and Lovine for $150 million. With this, HTC still held majority of the shares at 25.1%. HTC did this to prepare the company for global expansion and be competitive in the cellphone manufacturing industry. HTC acquired the rights to produce smartphones with the Beats branded audio system.

Beats has an existing partnership with Chrysler to provide its 2012 Chrysler 300S luxury cars with a 10-speaker Beats by Dr. Dre audio system. The success of its initial offerings led Chrysler to equip its Fiat 500 and Dodge Charger with Beats by Dr. Dre audio systems.

In July 2012, Beat successfully acquired MOG, an online music service provider. MOG is known to operate a music library with high quality streams. Beats believes that acquiring MOG would boost its mission to provide the best end-to-end music experience. However, MOG Music Network, MOG’s advertising network was not included in the purchase.