The Dish Moneybox This story first appeared in Inc. In six years, Interscope records mogul Jimmy Iovine and hip-hop icon Dr. Dre have turned Beats by Dr. Dre headphones into a $1 billion-plus business. Now, together with new president and former Interscope executive Luke Wood, they’re faced with a new challenge: taking a hot brand and making it, you might say, even hotter. To that end, Beats Electronics has introduced portable and wireless speakers, co-branded smartphones—and in January it even launched a new streaming music service, Beats Music, to compete with the likes of Spotify. “You’ve got to be lucky enough to identify a problem where you think you can help,” says Iovine. “We got dumped on by audiophiles on Day One,” says Iovine. Assemble an All-Star Focus Group Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for Beats by Dr. When developing the first Beats headphones, Iovine would lay out various prototypes in his Interscope offices and then poll everyone who came to see him. What Are Consumers Thinking About?
GOOD | A collaboration of individuals, businesses, and nonprofits RSS feed Wonkette — The D.C. Gossip Dissent Magazine No More Mister Nice Blog Pew Research Center | Nonpartisan, non-advocacy public opinion polling and demographic research Exclusive: Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy The forty-two-minute recording, acquired by James Carter IV, confirms Atwater’s incendiary remarks and places them in context. It has become, for liberals and leftists enraged by the way Republicans never suffer the consequences for turning electoral politics into a cesspool, a kind of smoking gun. The late, legendarily brutal campaign consultant Lee Atwater explains how Republicans can win the vote of racists without sounding racist themselves: You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” Now, the same indefatigable researcher who brought us Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” remarks, James Carter IV, has dug up the entire forty-two-minute interview from which that quote derives. Listen to the full forty-two-minute conversation with Atwater: The back-story goes like this. Those words soon became legend—quoted in both screeds (The GOP-Haters Handbook, 2007) and scholarship (Corey Robin's 2011 classic work of political theory, The Reactionary Mind). Not bloody likely.