Ever tried the Beats By Dre Headphones?
http://gizmodo.com/5981823/beat-by-dre-the-inside-story-of-how-monster-lost-the-worldThere's never been anything like Beats By Dre. The bulky rainbow headphones are a gaudy staple of malls, planes, clubs, and sidewalks everywhere: as mammoth, beloved, and expensive as their namesake. But Dr. Dre didn't just hatch the flashy lineup from his freight train chest: The venture began as an unlikely partnership between a record-industry powerhouse and a boutique audio company best known for making overpriced HDMI cables.
You might know this; you might own a pair of beats that still has Monster's tiny, subjugated logo printed on them. But what you don't know is how, in inking the deal, Monster screwed itself out of a fortune. It's the classic David vs Goliath story—with one minor edit: David gets his ass kicked and is laughed out of the arena. This is the inside story of one of the all time worst deals in tech.
The route to a rapper-gadget sensation doesn't start in the VIP section of a club over a bottle of Cristal. The idea wasn't hatched in the back of a Maybach or in a boardroom whose walls are decked out in platinum records and shark tanks. Before Dre got paid, and red 'B' logos clamped millions young heads across the globe, the son of Chinese immigrants started toying with audio equipment in California.
Beats begins with Monster, Inc., and Monster begins with Noel Lee. He's a friendly, incredibly smart man with a comic-book hairstyle and a disability that adds to his supervillain stature: Lee is unable to walk. Instead, he glides around on a chrome-plated Segway. Lee has been making things for your ears since 1979, after he took an engineering education and spun it into a components business with one lucrative premise: your music doesn't sound as good as it could.
In true Silicon Valley fashion, Lee started out in his family's basement: taste-testing different varieties of copper wire until he found a type that he thought enhanced audio quality. Then, also in Silicon Valley fashion, he marketed the shit out of it and jacked up its price: Monster Cable. Before it was ever mentioned in the same gasp as Dre, Monster was trying to get music lovers to buy into a superior sound that existed mostly in imaginations and marketing brochures. "We came up with a reinvention of what a speaker cable could be," Noel Lee boasts. His son, Kevin, describes it differently: "a cure for no disease."
Monster expanded into pricey HDMI cables, surge protectors, and... five different kinds of screen-cleaner. Unnecessary, overpriced items like these have earned Monster a reputation over the years as ripoff artists, but that belies the company's ability to make audio products that are actually pretty great. The truth is, audio cable is a lot like expensive basketball shoes: There are a couple hundred people in the world who really need the best, and the rest of us probably can't tell the difference. Doesn't matter: Through a combination of slick persuasion and status-pushing, Noel Lee carved out a small empire.
But you can only sell so many $200 cables. The next step was speakers, but the company started in on speakers too late; the hi-fi era was over. Plenty of people were content with the sound their TVs made, or at most, a soundbar. Monster took a bath.
But speakers for your head? This was the absolute, legit next big thing.
http://gizmodo.com/5981823/beat-by-dre-the-inside-story-of-how-monster-lost-the-world
