Beats Music will reportedly be rolled into iTunes next year

Apple announced plans to acquire Beats by Dre roughly six months ago, and the deal closed on August 1st. When Apple revealed its intention to purchase Beats many assumed what the company was really after was Beats Music, the streaming service that launched earlier this year.

Last month, word on the street was that Apple planned to ditch the Beats Music brand and roll the streaming service into iTunes. Now, the Wall Street Journal has reiterated those rumours as part of a larger story on falling iTunes music sales. The newspaper cites those all knowing “people familiar with the matter” in reporting that Apple is rebuilding Beats Music and plans to relaunch it next year as part of iTunes.

Apple paid $3 billion for Beats, so it makes sense for the company to repackage Beats Music rather than creating an iTunes streaming solution from scratch. What’s more, Beats Music was only live in one country (the U.S.), so it’s not as though it’s a massive, worldwide rebranding effort.

TechCrunch last month cited a fistful of sources that said Apple was planning to shut down Beats Music and had started moving engineers off Beats Music and onto iTunes as well as other projects at Apple. Recode later reported that while Beats Music would go away, the service would live on through iTunes. Such a move would certainly be a lot easier than trying to shoehorn the Beats Music brand into Apple’s own iPortfolio.

[source]Wall Street Journal[/source]