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Reportage AT THE COURT OF DR Heads up: advertising Beats in Times Square
Dr Dre with Lady Gaga
Richard Godwin is summoned to New York to meet the hip hop king, worth £160m, whose Beats headphones are his biggest hit
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n Tuesday night last week, as most of New York was watching Barack Obama and Mitt Romney square up on CNN, Dr Dre was hosting a party at The Darby, a favoured haunt of rappers which featured in American Psycho. The hip hop entrepreneur was celebrating the success of his audio business, The Beats by Dr Dre. A platoon of beautiful “hostesses” served martinis, champagne and steak, completely unadorned - whether as a statement or through oversight, we couldn’t be sure. Dre sat in a corner booth with his entourage, including his wife Nicole; his bodyguards; his business partner Jimmy Iovine, the veteran producer of John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen and U2 and American Idol mentor; and his chief operating officer, Luke Wood. Before long, the hip hop kingpin P Diddy joined them too, wearing a long sleeved Nirvana T-shirt. He and Dre had a conspicuous conference at the side of the room. These days, Diddy runs the vodka brand Ciroc, which helped him earn an estimated $45 million last year. Accord-
ing to Forbes magazine, Dre made more than three times that amount. Clearly, no one gets rich from actually making records any more. Dr Dre, 47, was born Andre Young in Los Angeles, and first made his name with the fierce rap group, NWA. After releasing his ground-breaking solo album The Chronic in 1992, he launched the careers of Snoop Dogg, Eminem and 50 Cent among others, before launching The Beats with Io-
n each h, and they $100 million each, igned deals with have also signed ckard d, Chrysler Hewlett-Packard, h and Fiat. The headphones d €300 per retail for around pair. r the Even if Bose remains hoice of many aupreferred choice eats has won diophiles, The Be Beats eting war hands the marketing o any popular p holdown - go to nation and you’ll iday destination s haw wking fakes see traders hawking k-off Louis alongside knock knock-off gs. An n early deciVuitton bags.
The Beats has won the marketing war hands down - go to any popular holiday destination and you’ll see traders hawking fakes alongside knock-off Louis Vuitton bags Fans: Will.i.am and (right) Amanda Seyfried
vine in 2008. Since then they have cornered more than half of the $1 billion headphones market, according to retail analysts NDP. A tie-in deal with handset manufacturer HTC in August made Dre and Iovine
sion was made to treat the headphones as if they were Eminem or U2, to “give them a personality”, as Iovine puts it. Dre’s “brand ambassadors” include major investor will.i.am, basketball player
LeBron James, teenage heart-throb Justin Bi b and d T Bieber Trentt R Reznor off Nine Inch Nails. During the Olympics, The Beats set up a temporary embassy in Shoreditch House to distribute the headphones to selected athletes. It was a flippant article that I wrote about this - something about how the