Apple Is Pulling the Plug on Beats Music: A Eulogy

Beats Music, sweet prince. We hardly knew you before you were snatched up by the Apple godfather and forced into subservience as the kind of successful, kind of maligned Apple Music. Now after months of not accepting anyone new in your doors, on November 30th you’ll lock them for good. Beats Music users can migrate to Apple Music, and all remaining 12 probably will.

You never quite had the EDM fix we wanted. You were surprisingly fond of pop country, and you shed users like a bad deep house set. Still some people actually loved you. Before you go let’s take a moment and remember the good times.

Just For You

How wonderful you made us feel. Recommending new artists and albums like you were just one of the gang. While other streaming services gave us options like “browse” or “search,” you were a friend. Not just a friend, a cool friend. Like if Trent Reznor had a little brother we were cool enough to know. These choices (and your playlists) were chosen mostly by human-curation, not the shoddy robots that would suggest you Major Lazer if you listened to Diplo. As if.

The Sentence

Who could hate “The Sentence” feature of Beats Music? There was nothing quite like doing a Mad Libs to describe what kind of music we wanted provided to us. Options like “At the Park” and “In My Pajamas” were like quiet admissions to a secret friend. As if to say, “Don’t worry bro. I know you’re naked and feel like crushing your skull with the toilet seat to techno. I got chu.” We might never get to describe ourselves so deeply to an inanimate object ever again.

“What music do you like?”

Like most normal people, we tend to visualize the music we like as brightly-colored circles, jockeying for our attention. Getting bigger and bigger the more we play with them (giggity). Never mind that phone screens were never big enough to get it all in one place, dammit it was the emotion we craved. Dre and Jimmy Iovine might have some great ideas, but they can never take credit for truly unlocked the way every music fan wants to define themselves: our biggest balls.

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Luckily almost all of Beats’ best features are available on Apple Music, even on Android. In time we’ll probably never even think of B anymore. We’ll move on to younger, richer services. Beats Music will live on only in our hearts and minds, hiding quietly in the shadows, and like Sasquatch we will forever quietly chase the idea of it…never really being sure we actually want to find it.