We’ve already told you there’s a new streaming music service coming to town challenging the likes of Spotify and Pandora, called Beats Music. Other than reserving a username and seeing a myriad of athletes/musicians prancing around in the stylish headphones we didn’t now much else about the service, until this article in the the NY Times). If you want to know the basics of what Beats Music does, take a look at the features of Spotify… Beats Music has the same capabilities.

Let’s focus on what’s different. The draw is what they call “THE RIGHT MUSIC FOR YOU. RIGHT NOW.” and “GET PLAYLISTS FOR WHATEVER YOU’RE DOING.” Beats Music is adding more than the type of music to the discovery/listening equation. Now, in addition to Genre (Jazz, Hop-Hop), the equation takes into consideration: where you are, what you’re doing, who you’re with. (In Six Sigma, this is called the 5 Why’s: a process designed to get to the root cause of a problem). In essence, Beats Music making music more personal, or tailored, if you will, by asking you four critical pieces of information: place, activity, people and, of course, genre. It will be interested to see is if Beats Music defaults to the clean version of a given record, based on who you’re with. 

Let me share some examples of what you may tell the service:

In the car with my nieces and want to hear hip hop.

At a BBQ with friends and want to hear hip hop.

At a church banquet and want to hear Gospel.

A retirement party and want to hear Blues.

At a wedding reception and want to hear Jazz.

The service will be available on January 21st with 20 million songs and will cost you $10/month or $100/year. If you don’t want to pony up the money just yet, you can enjoy a free 7-day trial.