Apple’s acquisition of Beats has been the talk of the town for the last few weeks. Cupertino is paying $3 billion for a company that makes high-end headphones and recently launched its own music streaming service. Some might have scratched their heads when they heard how much Apple paid. A survey shows that Apple may even have been able to boost its “coolness” factor among younger users by acquiring a company that’s believed to be quite “cool” itself.
Chegg, an education technology company, recently surveyed 10,000 students. Nearly every student surveyed had heard of Beats before despite the fact that only 15 percent had ever bought a Beats product. 60 percent were aware that Apple had picked up Beats. When asked for their thoughts on the deal almost half of all the students said this would make Apple cooler among the youth with a quarter answering that it makes Apple more “cool.”
However despite the fact that majority of the students had heard about Beats, nearly 61 percent were only aware that the company even has a music subscription service. It currently has 250,000 subscribers and to bring it at par with competitors like Spotify, with 40 million strong subscriber bases, Beats needs to do a much better job of getting the word out.
With Apple set to take over design of Beats hardware in a few months its headphones are likely going to attract buyers who previously thought they were just bass-heavy showpieces. “Street cred” with the youngsters certainly won’t hurt.
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