Beats Music after 100 days: what the CEO says

Beats Music CEO Ian Rogers has issued a 100-days report on the company blog. Part marketing and part affirmation of company strategy (if there’s much difference between the two), Rogers’ key message is this: “We’re just getting started but already one thing is becoming clear–numbers don’t lie: a curated, personalized music service that drives discovery and connects listeners directly to artists IS worth paying for. We’ve always known it.”

If the emphasis on strategic worth sounds like an argument, it could be because of a recent report that Beats Music was not adding subscribers quickly enough to satisfy hungry record labels, and that the mobile app would switch to in-app sign-ups, yielding 30% of that revenue to Apple.

Putting all that aside, Rogers’ blog post contains interesting numbers, packaged in a nifty infographic.

• 690 years of listening time in the first 100 days. (Accumulating media consumption into years is always fun and impressive.)
• 70% of Beats users listened to a song for the first time via a curated playlist. This stat is useful to Beats Music marketing, as it affirms that those curated lists are popular, and potentially lead to music discovery. Human-powered playlist creation is a foundation of the company’s marketing.
• More than half of all listening occurs in the unique playlists and The Sentence, which is an activity/mood toy within the service. Again, affirming the strategy.
• Two-million user playlists have been created.
• More than half of Beats’ customers user the app more than once a day.

None of this deals with certain key business metrics: Number of subscribers, and rate of conversion from trials. But Rogers touches on that second point by explaining that the conversion rate is 40% higher than he expected. Also, 33% of subscriptions have come through the AT&T partnership.