Amid the furor of Apple's $3 billion purchase of Beats, pundits asked why the Cupertino company would sink so much capital into what amounts to a brand name. A report on Thursday now claims a shortsighted and credulous iTunes management team put out an inferior product in iTunes Radio, which in turn forced the acquisition.
Citing multiple sources, Buzzfeed claims the Apple's iTunes managers ignored competing streaming music offerings like Pandora to the point where some didn't know that popular app Spotify was a subscription service. The resulting product, iTunes Radio, is feature deficient compared to rival streamers, in both content curation and purpose, these people said.
"The management in particular were pretty much tone-deaf in what Spotify was and that's why they're panicking now," one person said. "They didn't understand how Spotify worked, which is why they thought iTunes Radio would be a Spotify killer."
According to the source, other managers saw Pandora as a "dead company" because of its troubles in generating revenue. Ironically, engineers in the group reportedly preferred the competition's offerings to iTunes Radio, especially Spotify which rolls in serious social network integration.