I remember the first time I heard about Beats by Dre. I was around 12 years old and was showing a friend my new Skullcandy headphones. I recall them being quite comfortable and loved the design. You could fold them quite easily, so I would carry them around with me all the time. My friend then got out her Beats and told me to try them on. They were quite cushy and the sound quality was good, but at the time I didn’t really appreciate that. 200 Euros for a pair of headphones?! And I thought my 40 Euros Skullcandy were expensive.
A few years later, around 2013, Beats had become very popular. A few of my friends had bought them but still, I really didn’t understand why people liked them so much or why they were so expensive. I started to see many artists I listened to wearing them, as well as athletes. The more I saw them, the more I liked them.
When my pair of Skullcandy broke, I decided to look for some new headphones. I wanted to invest into some good quality headphones as I spent many hours listening to music. I went to the shop and looked at various brands: Sony, Sennheiser, Bose and of course, Beats. I think they had 3 models back then, the Solo which cost 200€, the Studio which were 300€ and the Pro which were 500€. However, they had the Beats Studio on offer to 200€. It was a lot of money, but it was a good deal and I thought “These will probably last me years and given I love to listen to music, why not?”. So, I decided to give myself a treat and I buy them.
To start with, the packaging was amazing. Bold, sleek, simple. It reminded me a lot to Apple’s packaging. The packaging of a product has to reflect the quality of the product inside. This is something I didn’t really appreciate, until the last few years. Especially, when working a project last semester called “Retail Therapy”, where we had to design and make an appropriate product to be offered for sale to the public. Almost a quarter of the time spent designing the product was spent designing its packaging and branding. On the side of the box there was a quote from Dre. It said, “People aren’t hearing all the music”. For some reason, that quote stuck on my mind.
The design of the headphones was great. They were uniform and seemed like a single piece design, unlike other where there was a gap between the headband and housing, and the colours where amazing: black with a touch of red and silver. And the quality was excellent. The earpads were very comfortable and wrapped around your ears, immersing you in the sound. I was able to appreciate sounds in the music which other headphones didn’t allow me to. The bass was something different.
Since that day, I have always used Beats Headphones to listen to music. Unfortunately, the headband deteriorated over time and after 4 years, I decided to buy a new pair. Same model but new version. Beats Studio 2.0. Last year I even bought a pair of Beats Solo Wireless and use them to exercise and are better to carry them around, as they are slightly smaller and have no wires attached.
But how did the concept begin? What made them come up with this idea? What was their purpose? And what made Beats so successful?
When designing the Beats, Dr. Dre (music producer) and Jimmy Iovine (entrepreneur), explored and compared hundreds of pair of headphones with all different designs. “We realized that all headphones sounded boring and looked like medical equipment. We wanted more bass in these headphones to exaggerate all of it. We wanted to put it on steroids.” said Jimmy in Netflix’s documentary “The Defiant Ones”.
The Bose headphones were advertising noise canceling. Total quiet. They’re the headphones if you want to go to sleep on a plane. On the other hand, Jimmy thought of Beats headphones as the “where’s-the-party headphones”.
They worked with designer Robert Brunner and with Monster Cable, owned by audio engineer Noel Lee. Robert talks about the design process in an interview with Paste Magazine.
“I was introduced to Jim Iovine and Dr. Dre through a friend of a friend. They had this very specific belief that there was an audience and an entire young generation that was lost to the idea of great sound, being brought up listening to compressed audio through inexpensive earbuds. What they wanted to do was not just sell the higher end audio experience to their audience but also do it in a way that was tuned to their music. That was really important. Our secret weapon was we had two guys who actually created and produced a lot of the music helping us tune the products.
We began working closely with Jimmy and Dre before there even was a Beats company organization. It was just those two guys. We began building that product and it turned out that we were right. Jimmy’s a smart enough businessman to notice that for his audience, there was no audio company that they were super fired up to be involved with. It certainly wasn’t Bose, it wasn’t Sony, and it wasn’t Sennheiser. So we helped build an enormous business that was eventually acquired by Apple for a huge sum of money. It was a nice validation of our work.
When we first started working on it and we decided we were going to do an over-the-head and over-the-ear headphone, I did a quick audit of everything that was out there and everything in the works. They all shared the same sort of design approach of being functional in ergonomics. You had big ear cuffs, highly articulated adjustments to the phones, and a padded headband. They all worked very well but they were just very busy, mechanical things. I remember looking at the front-on view of one pair of standard headphones and I drew this single line that ran from ear to ear. I wanted to achieve something that was all that stuff together and simplified into one cohesive form that was beautiful and actually looked good on you. That was the impetus. Then we had to go back and make sure we could deliver all the functionality, structure, and durability within that form, which was no simple task.
I’ve always believed in things that are simple, beautiful and have longevity. It’s not a purist approach to minimalism but building clean, expressive things.” says Robert.
Jimmy explains how everyone felt they wouldn’t be able to sell headphones. Why would people spend so much money on them when Apple and other companies would give away headphones for free with phones? So, he figured out, if he could get them on the right musicians, then kids will try them and once they hear them they will never go back to something that sounds poor. So, everywhere he went, he put the headphones on people and took a picture.
“You walked in his office, you were getting hit with a flash.”
“It was the constant: “What do you think of these?””
“You were not getting out of that office unless Jimmy could take a picture. And if you refused to put the Beats in your videos… Jimmy might cut your budget [laughs].”
Diddy, Snoop Dogg, Justin Timberlake, Bono, Steve Jobs… they all had pictures taken with these headphones on.
They went from 27,000 to 1,600,000 headphones in one year. They started with artists, the moved to athletes. The marketing was natural. And athletes embraced Beats as music is part of the ritual of training. However, soon there was a controversy as athletes can’t wear anything that’s not from an official sponsor, so sports associations started to ban players from using the headphones. Can you think of a better publicity? I can’t.
In 2014 Apple bought Beats for 3 billion dollars. The biggest deal in Apple’s history. “Music is such an important part of all of our lives and holds a special place within our hearts at Apple,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “That’s why we have kept investing in music and are bringing together these extraordinary teams so we can continue to create the most innovative music products and services in the world.”
“I’ve always known in my heart that Beats belonged with Apple,” said Jimmy Iovine. “The idea when we started the company was inspired by Apple’s unmatched ability to marry culture and technology. Apple’s deep commitment to music fans, artists, songwriters and the music industry is something special.”
Jimmy and Dre created this. Out of nothing. It became a fashion statement. A part of the culture. And that is something you can’t spend no amount of money to create.
What do you think? Are they worth the money? Or are you paying only for the brand? What has made Beats headphones such a success? Is it a great design? Or a great marketing strategy? If you ask me, it’s a combination of both. You can have a revolutionary idea but if you don’t know how to sell it, what good is it? But they knew.