Shortly after Apple's $3 billion takeover of Beats in 2014, Beats president Luke Wood dropped all attention on Beats Music in favor of the company's flagship Electronics division, according to an interview published on Tuesday.
Zane Lowe and Luke Wood at Monday's Beats Sound Symposium.
Apple Music carries on much of Beats' thinking on curation and discovery, Wood commented to Mashable. Beats Music was the foundation of Apple's on-demand streaming service, and will eventually shut down once subscriber migration finishes. Wood's statement may suggest that Apple Music development began almost immediately after the Beats buyout.
Currently, Beats Electronics is looking to expand sales to markets where its speakers and headphones have little to no footprint, Wood said.
"There are markets in Asia where the brand has not spent a lot of time. In India, Bollywood and music drives culture like almost nowhere else in the world. Brazil is another," he noted. "We want to become a more globally focused brand and just make great products."
Wood also spoke on a variety of other topics, for instance claiming that music listeners are finally "getting" high-quality audio, having previously been willing to settle for lower quality in the peak of filesharing during the early 2000s.
At the same time the executive addressed complaints that Beats products favor bass at the expense of the rest of the sound range. Beats' first-generation headphones were made to "replicate the excitement of modern albums," Wood said, referring to changes like digital recording and synthesizers, and the advent of sub-amplifiers.
Apple has left Beats Electronics relatively unchanged in terms of product design and marketing. The most notable difference has been the addition of gold, silver, and space gray colors to some product lines, and even greater presence within Apple Stores.
On Monday Wood appeared alongside Beats 1 DJ Zane Lowe at others at the Beats Sound Symposium in Sydney, Australia. He spoke with Mashable away from that event.