Beats Music Streaming Service Launches January 2014, Fires Up Username Reservations

The new Beats Music streaming music service will launch January 2014, according to CEO Ian Rogers. The service also launched a ‘name claiming’ site today that lets you snag a primo username early.

The project has been in private alpha for a while under the code-name Project Daisy, and has been garnering some heated attention.

“If you’ve spent any time around me in the past six months you’ve surely seen me buried in my phone making playlists, poking, prodding, and testing our forthcoming service,Beats Music,” said Rogers in a blog posting today. “When I joined Beats Music in January I’d expected we’d get this out the door before the end of the year. Thankfully I work with people who have patience and are more concerned about getting Beats Music right than pushing it out the door. In retrospect we’ve accomplished far more this year than I’d imagined possible.”

Rogers was previously the GM of Yahoo Music and launched TopSpin Media in 2008. The core of the streaming service is formed by Beats $14M acquisition of digital music company MOG least year.

He also gives a list of facts about Beats Music as it stands now. It’s in an internal, private beta with ‘people who know and love music’. It’s also rolled out to some ‘artists and other influencers’ in order to get feedback, so celebs are playing with it as we speak. Rogers says they’re tweaking the service based on the feedback that they’re getting, and reiterates that the service is set to launch in January.

Beats Electronics CEO Jimmy Iovine, one of the most influential producers in the business, also has his fingers in this pie. Earlier this year, there was a report that Iovine had met with Apple CEO Tim Cook and Apple SVP Eddy Cue about the service, with the intent of finding out how Daisy planned to stand out from the field o streaming music services. Since then, Apple has launched its own iTunes Radio streaming service, available on Macs, PCs, Apple TV and iOS devices.

The Beats Music service was spun out of Beats Electronics and into its own company early this year, receiving a $60M investment to bring the product to market. The investment was led by Len Blavatnik’s Access Industries along with Marc Rowan, James Packer and entities affiliated with Lee M. Bass. The project has some fairly large entertainment names behind it including Beats Electronics co-founders Iovine and Dr. Dre, along with Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor as Chief Creative Officer.

Beats Music shoulders into a crowded field, which includes iTunes Radio from Apple, Google All Access Music from you know who and the popular players like Rdio and Spotify. Some details from GigaOm back in August reveal that the core experience will be centered around curated playlists created by musicians and music writers.

What we’ve heard is that there may also be an additional hook to the Beats Music service. Specifically, they have at one point worked on a feature that would allow you to listen along to whatever a celeb was currently playing on the service. Imagine if Trent Reznor’s iPod could become a sort of ‘Turntable.fm’ room that allowed you to peek into what he was playing now. Think ‘Rdio in real-time’.

That sounds like a clever addition, but whether it’s enough to pop Beats Music out the other end of the music service grinder intact remains to be seen.

Additional reporting on this story by Josh Constine.