Apple will reportedly merge Beats Music into iTunes in an effort to combat declining music sales in the iTunes store.
Apple acquired Beats Electronics, including Beats Music, in May for $3 billion.
"Apple is rebuilding Beats Music and plans to relaunch it next year as part of iTunes, according to a person familiar with the matter," said a report.
The news follows reports last month that suggested that Apple would be shutting down Beats Music entirely. This report came as a surprise, with many expecting Apple to simply integrate it into iTunes, like the latest report suggests. Apple quickly denied the reports that were published last month.
The latest report also mentions that digital music sales from iTunes have fallen 13 percent to 14 percent since the beginning of the year and that services such as Spotify and Pandora offer a much wider selection of music for a monthly subscription. The addition of Beats Music to iTunes may help smooth the decline in sales for Apple.
Beats Music itself is currently only supported in the U.S. and provides access to over 20 million songs for $10 per month. If it was wrapped into iTunes, it is likely that the service would be available in countries across the globe.
"The plummeting download numbers help illustrate why Apple bought the $10-a-month subscription streaming service Beats Music earlier this year, as part of its $3 billion acquisition that included headphone maker Beats Electronics," said the report.
While Apple is not completely new to the music streaming industry, having launched iTunes Radio last year, the service failed to meet expectations or achieve any of its goals. Rolling Beats Music into iTunes would make sense, especially considering Beats Music only had 250,000 users as of May and iTunes currently has around 800 million users and 400 million credit cards on file.
It's important to note that Apple would be fine even if iTunes sales stopped completely. iTunes is essentially a way for Apple to entice users to buy iPhones, iPads, MacBooks and iMacs. What this means is that when iTunes does relaunch, it may be able to negotiate cheaper subscription rates with record labels.
Recent reports suggest that Apple may be looking at offering a $5 per month subscription rate for Beats Music. The $60 per year rate is reportedly the same amount that many heavy iTunes users pay to buy music from the iTunes Store.
Beats Music is far behind the likes of Spotify, Pandora and Google Music in the number of subscribers, but it is likely that some of that ground could be made up with lower rates.
