Are New Analytics Coming To Beats Music?

Musicmetric sample

Apple recently acquired a British analytics service company called Semetric, according to The Guardian, making many wonder whether improved analytics will be part of the new Beats Music when it relaunches later this year. Although an exact sales price was not revealed, it's estimated by the Financial Times to be around $50 million.

The interesting part of the deal is that Semetric owns the music analytic service called Musicmetric, which specializes in tracking sales, pirated downloads and artist social media for labels and independent clients (see a sample on the left). The company recently struck a deal with Spotify to include its dashboard on the service, although another analytics company, Next Big Sound, provides the data.

While virtually all streaming music services provide some sort of analytics, the presumption is that Musicmetric brings greater depth than what's normally available, which could be a factor in making Beats Music more attractive to some labels and artists.

Apple has also been attempting to renegotiate its current licensing deals with the major labels in order to bring the monthly subscription fee down to around $5, which could be the killer feature for consumers. This is no sure thing, however, as the labels have been very reluctant to do so.

Whatever the case, Beats Music is set to cause some disruption in the streaming music side of the business. Both Spotify and Pandora should be very concerned, as they don't have nearly the deep pockets to match an all-out effort by Apple to gain market share.