Apple's Beats Music Brand May Go Away. Apple's Beats Music Service Is Sticking Around.

Earlier this year, Apple bought Beats Music and Beats Electronics for $3 billion. Since then, CEO Tim Cook has gone out of his way to rave about the Beats Music subscription service, which sells all-you-can-eat music for $10 a month.

So why would Apple plan to shut down Beats Music, as a TechCrunch headline reports?

Answer: It’s not.

Tom Neumayr, Apple’s PR rep, says the TechCrunch story is “not true” but wouldn’t go beyond that.

I can elaborate a bit more, based on conversations with people familiar with Apple’s thinking: Apple won’t shutter the streaming service. It may, however, modify it over time, and one of those changes could involved changing the Beats Music brand.

Note that Apple does seem pretty pleased with the iTunes brand, which was the focus of its controversial U2 album giveaway this month.

Shuttering the Beats Music brand name makes some sense, as the company hadn’t generated a ton of traction before Apple bought it in May — at that time, it only had a few hundred thousand subscribers. On the other hand, the Beats headphone brand, which Apple doesn’t have any plans to dump, does have a lot of recognition, so it would seem bizarre to dump that.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

We have a request

Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. But when it comes to what we’re trying to do at Vox, there are a couple of issues with relying on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on:

1. Advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan.

2. We’re not in the subscriptions business. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world — we believe that’s an important part of building a more equal society. And we can’t do that if we have a paywall.

It’s important that we have several ways we make money, and that’s why we ask readers for help keeping Vox free. Our goal today is for 47 Vox readers to pledge an annual financial gift to Vox to help us keep our work free for everyone. Will you become one of them?

One-Time Monthly Annual

$95/year

$120/year

$250/year

$350/year

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $120/year

Yes, I'll give $120/year

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via