Apple’s Beats Music Brand May Go Away. Apple’s Beats Music Service Is Sticking Around.

Earlier this year, Apple bought Beats Music and Beats Electronics for $3 billion. Since then, CEO Tim Cook has gone out of his way to rave about the Beats Music subscription service, which sells all-you-can-eat music for $10 a month.

So why would Apple plan to shut down Beats Music, as a TechCrunch headline reports?

Answer: It’s not.

Tom Neumayr, Apple’s PR rep, says the TechCrunch story is “not true” but wouldn’t go beyond that.

I can elaborate a bit more, based on conversations with people familiar with Apple’s thinking: Apple won’t shutter the streaming service. It may, however, modify it over time, and one of those changes could involved changing the Beats Music brand.

Note that Apple does seem pretty pleased with the iTunes brand, which was the focus of its controversial U2 album giveaway this month.

Shuttering the Beats Music brand name makes some sense, as the company hadn’t generated a ton of traction before Apple bought it in May — at that time, it only had a few hundred thousand subscribers. On the other hand, the Beats headphone brand, which Apple doesn’t have any plans to dump, does have a lot of recognition, so it would seem bizarre to dump that.