It’s been a while since we’ve heard much about Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre’s Beats Music, but our music industry spies say Iovine is having fresh talks with artists about doing exclusives.
Beats executives — now Apple employees — are looking to replicate the kind of success Beyoncé had with her iTunes album, “Beyoncé by Beyoncé,” back in December 2013.
Beats already has a bunch of connections with artists including Nicki Minaj, who frequently stars with Beats products in her music videos. Iovine is also good friends with Will.i.am, Pharrell, Kanye West and Gwen Stefani.
The idea of artists making their own side deals with streaming services doesn’t go down too well with record label brass, however.
It’s been almost a year since Beats Music launched with a brace of Super Bowl spots starring Ellen DeGeneres and a big promotional backing from AT&T.
The promotional relationship ended a few months ago, and parties are discussing future deals. “They outperformed expectations in terms of the upsell,” said one source of AT&T.
On the Money’s phone-industry sources suggest Beats Music subscribers stand at around 300,000.
There’s still no time frame for Apple’s planned Beats Music makeover, which may include dumping the name.
On the p.r. front, Beats Music has been pretty quiet since the $3 billion Apple take-over, which included Beats Electronics. There’s no standing still in the fast-moving streaming music wars, however, and Apple had better jump in big and soon. Another Super Bowl buy perhaps?
In the meantime, we’ll just have to satisfy ourselves with the company’s newish Beats headphones commercial starring — you guessed it — Kendall and Kylie Jenner and set to the music of Axwell ^ Ingrosso. The song’s called “Something New.”
Viral flight
The Little Nell Hotel is going to be bursting at the seams this week. This season’s holiday hot spot for ritzy New Yorkers happens to be a return to an old one: Aspen.
Our slope-side sources say the usual in-crowd is forgoing Caribbean destinations such as St. Barts and Anguilla for the end-of-year holidays after the Centers for Disease Control issued a warning on the dangers of “chikungunya.” Yes, it sounds like the name of a fried burrito, but it’s really much scarier.
It’s a mosquito-borne virus that recently arrived in the Caribbean islands, infecting 10,000 people in Puerto Rico alone. “People have been canceling parties,” said one friend of On the Money.
A source told On the Money that Blade, the Midtown helicopter service to JFK airport and Jersey’s private jet runway Teterboro, is packed with folks dressed in furry puffer jackets and Oakley sports sunglasses ready to take to the slopes. “The Blade lounge is full of ski equipment instead of beach bags.” Aspen regulars include billionaires John Paulson, William Koch and John Doerr. Ivanka Trump and the Hiltons are all regulars in the upscale destination.
Thinking young
A tech platform that integrates robo financial advice and traditional wealth management handholding is launching just as the market is hitting all-time highs.
New York-based Vanare just snapped up NestEgg Wealth last week in a private deal said to have a valuation in the tens of millions.
The merger plan is to deliver a platform that supports both millennials, who say they tend to prefer digital online financial advice over human contact, as well as baby boomers who rely on financial advisers.
The combined company will capture millennials, says Vanare CEO Rich Cancro, a 20-year Wall Street veteran who launched with the company’s first investment adviser client last summer.
Alexey Sokolin, 30, who founded NestEgg in 2010, will now be a partner and COO.
Sokolin says he launched NestEgg to help millennials invest online and get financial advice — and ultimately discovered $14 trillion in assets in that market, $3 trillion of which is managed by independent financial advisers.
“We are not trying to spend lots of money to position ourselves as separate. We are working in partnership with financial advisers, ” Sokolin told our Julie Earle-Levine.