Kanye West is known for saying and doing some silly things so it shouldn’t surprise us that his take on why Apple “really” decided to buy Beats for $3 billion is less than astute. Per AppleInsider, Yeezy thinks that Apple needed to buy Beats because it couldn’t let Samsung hog all of the “cultural credibility” in the hip-hop world after Samsung got Jay-Z to promote its phones.
“There would have been no Beats deal without the Samsung deal,” West explained. “It showed the No. 1 company the importance of connecting with culture. The reason I said I didn’t like Samsung particularly is because throughout my entire life, because of how my parents raised me, I have to work with the No. 1. […] Samsung is not quite Apple, but it showed that Jimmy and Dre would be able to connect with the No. 1 influencers.”
Of course, Samsung’s endorsement deal with Jay-Z cost the company somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million, which is significantly less than the $3 billion that Apple paid for Beats. If Apple really did want to shore up its credibility in the hip-hop world, it probably could have found ways to do so without spending quite so much money.
All that said, Kanye’s analysis than the Apple-Beats deal isn’t nearly as bad as some of the other analysis we’ve read of Apple over the past year. In fact, we’d be perfectly happy if Piper Jaffray hired Kanye as a replacement for Gene Munster, if for no other reason than it would stop all talk about the iTV for a little bit.
