Beats Music has quickly established that it could provide worthy competition to Spotify and other streaming services upon its arrival in late 2013. Still, it will take forever for the service to catch up to Spotify, right? Maybe not. A massive deal in the works could potentially make Beats Music bigger than its main competitor overnight. It all revolves around ongoing negotiations between Beats and AT&T.
Spotify is the current leader of the streaming market in terms of customers paying a fee for "premium" service, with more than one million on board. However, it's estimated that Muve Music has around two million paying customers. "Wait a minute," you say, justifiably. "I've never even heard of Muve." The service is part of Cricket Wireless, and it works differently than Spotify in that you can only get it if you pay. The thing is, a Muve plan also includes cell phone service and data, so Cricket customers figure they might as well pay the extra few bucks to get music streaming on their phones.
The problem is that Cricket Wireless is going under. And AT&T bought it on the cheap during November. And AT&T is friendly with Beats.
The phone company is considering scrapping the Muve service and merely replacing it with Beats Music, a system that more would agree is superior to Muve in terms of product anyhow. That would, essentially, turn two million Muve customers into two million Beats customers.
None of these plans have actually been shared with the public however. According to Digital Music News, someone leaked some confidential e-mails discussing the matter.
