Dr.Dre Confirms That Apple Is Looking At Acquiring Beats Electronics for $3.2 Billion

Dr.Dre has confirmed that Apple is looking at purchasing his Beats Electronics line for $3.2 Billion, which will be the highest acquisition ever for Apple.

Apple’s last ever highest offer was for $400 million with the purchase of Next Computer Inc. in 1997 as part of an arrangement to bring Steve Jobs back into the fold. So now you see why $3.2 Billion may be a little too hard for Dre and Jimmy to say “no” to.

If the founders Dr.Dre and Jimmy Iovine say “Yes” to this offer, this will bump Dre up to the #1 spot in Forbes Top Hip Hop Income Earners this year, taking out Diddy, moving the hip hop Mogul to 2nd place.

Beats Electronics is the maker of the high-end Beats by Dre headphones, which first went on sale in 2008. Since then, the company has grown and reportedly posted $1.2 billion in revenue last year.

The company also launched Beats Music in January, which is a service that allows customers to stream music for $10 a month. It rivals other similar services, most notably Swedish startup Spotify.

The picture of Eminem & Dr.Dre standing in front of the Apple office was found recently on Twitter and confirms there are discussions going on between Beats & Apple. Tyrese even recorded a video with Dr.Dre in the studio, celebrating the fact that Dr.Dre will be the first West Coast Hip Hop Billionaire and that Forbes needs to update their list.

With all of the billions at hand, maybe Dre will finally have the time and focus to drop his long-awaited Album “Detox” and claim his #1 spot back in the billboard charts also.

So why would Apple want to purchase Beats Electronics?

Jimmy Iovine praises Apple for reinventing the music business, with one caveat: sound quality. This is the key bit:

Apple got everything right—except that earbud.

It wasn’t so much the files. Your sound system is only as good as its weakest link. And when you have an entire generation hailing Apple and thinking because that earbud is in there and it’s white and that means you’ve got class or style or swag because you have that white earbud…

It sounded terrible. It had no emotion. Why? Because it was flat, and Steve liked that. They wanted it flat. That was in there to see if it worked. That’s it. There was no emotion.

So Dre used to come to me all the time to say, I don’t care about the stealing music part. What I really care about is that the music is not being interpreted right. I spend months on one song, and it sounds terrible. It sounds terrible on laptops and PCs, and it sounds terrible on this earbud. So we got together, and we decided to try to move the thing over, to make young kids listen to sound.

So if Beats did anything, it got young people interested in audio again, which really just was not cool for a really long time. No one cared about audio.

We’ll keep you posted if, and when the deal finally goes through.