Two years ago, HTC poured $300 million into “Beats”, the company owned and operated by Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine. You’ve seen their products, those massive overpriced headphones that come in exceptionally loud colors. According to The Wall Street Journal, Beats doesn’t want to deal with HTC anymore, and they’re looking to raise some debt to buy out HTC’s 25% stake in the company.
Why? Because Beats wants to grow, expand into car audio, speakers, even online music streaming. At this point, the “Beats” brand is likely stronger than HTC’s brand, so you can see why they’d want to break up with the Taiwanese handset maker.
What will this mean for HTC? I want to say absolutely nothing, but I’m going to get hate mail from Beats fans. The Beats “optimizations” that HTC does to their devices is nothing more than an equalizer trick. And as for the headphones that HTC bundles with their phones, there are countless numbers of other companies who HTC can call upon.
