Some 200 employees of Beats Electronics will not retain job permanence as Apple closes the $3 billion acquisition of the celebrity-fronted headphones company.
A source close to Apple who spoke on condition of anonymity said that while Apple will retain key Beats personnel in the creative and development departments, around 200 employees or more than 25% of Beats' workforce will not be having jobs at Apple longer than six months before the company terminates them at the end of January 2015. Most of the employees affected by the layoffs make up Beats' support, finance and human resources department says the source.
Apple spokesperson Tom Neumayr confirmed the layoffs, although he was more apt to call them "transitional" job offers as Beats employees look for a more permanent job outside of Apple. Aside from five performance-based firings, Neumayr said no other employee from Beats was immediately handed the pink slip.
"We're excited to have the Beats team join Apple, and we have extended job offers to every Beats employee," Neumayr said. "Because of some overlap in our operations, some offers are for a limited period and we'll work hard during this time to find as many of these Beats employees as we can another permanent job within Apple."
Neumayr also said that Apple has set up an exclusive hotline for Beats employees to speak with the human resources staff at Apple and arrange job transitions and severance packages.
The work on transitioning Beats' top-brass executives, however, are a different story, with Beats co-founder and music production legend Jimmy Iovine and rapper Andre Young, better known as Dr. Dre, already settling in at Apple's Cupertino office. Dre himself even made a guest appearance at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in June. Sources say that Beats music chief executive Ian Rogers will also remain at Apple to head the company's iTunes Radio, while creative chief Trent Razor, also the lead vocalist for Nine Inch Nails, is also rumored to work at Apple in some capacity.
Rumors of Apple's acquisition of Beats first surfaced in May this year, with the confirmation coming out of Cupertino a few weeks after. Apple says the Beats merger will help the iPhone maker improve Apple's music-streaming service iTunes, which it hopes can benefit from Beats' music curation technology to match up to the likes of Spotify and Pandora, which are currently the biggest streaming music providers.
