Bose, known for its speakers and headphones, has decided to venture into music production. With Bose Studios, the company is launching a record label, film studios, and podcast studios. Their plan: to generate royalty-free music for use in their own advertisements, offering artists favorable terms. For the public, this means more sonic options, but the business is a swampy terrain where others have already failed.
The technical risk of producing your own content 🎧
Bose's strategy involves creating a closed ecosystem: from recording to advertising synchronization. The company dominates acoustics and signal processing, but music production requires different skills. Managing catalogs, negotiating with artists, and competing with stock libraries like Epidemic Sound is not the same as designing noise cancellation. The corporate audio market is narrow, and margins are tight. Vertical integration sounds good on paper, but executing it without losing money is a different story.
Spoiler: turning up the volume won't be enough 🎵
It seems that at Bose they think if they make good headphones, they'll also know how to make hits. Perhaps their next product will be a speaker that composes jingles while telling you a joke. History shows that hardware companies rarely succeed in the content business. But hey, if they fail, at least we'll have test songs for their headphones with more bass than a disco on Mars. Optimism is free, the music catalog, not so much.