Kanye West has claimed that he turned down a “multi-million dollar” partnership with Apple in a meeting with his design team.
Though Kanye didn’t elaborate upon what the partnership would have entailed, The New York Times reports that the music mogul stated that at some point he was in talks with the tech giant, possibly when the company’s late CEO Steve Jobs was still at its reins. Kanye’s admiration for Jobs is well-known, with Jobs possessing the entrepreneurial spirit that the Yeezus creator so keenly admires.
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The timeframe of when the talks between Kanye and Apple took place is not clear, though the company may have been looking to develop branded hardware in the vein of Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine’s Beats headphones. The company purchased Beats for $3 billion last year, with the two companies soon set to host a Beats relaunch that has already seen big names such as Pharrell hope on board, in order to add more star power to the event.
It could be that Apple were looking to either work with Kanye prior to their acquisition of Beats with the initial hopes of developing rivaling hardware, or that they were looking to bring Kanye on board for an exclusivity deal with Beats Music. Given that Jay-Z has already suggested that Iovine was looking to lure away backers of his TIDAL streaming platform to Beats, this seems like a reasonable guess. It would also explain why Kanye turned down the multi-million dollar deal, given his friendship with Jay-Z and the likelihood that he wouldn’t want to rock the boat by partnering with Beats and Apple.
Apple may have hoped to court Kanye away from TIDAL.
The Verge suggested that West could have potentially been in talks to work with Apple on the design of their hardware, though with West’s experience in design limited to fashion, it’s unlikely that the company would have offered him a multi-million dollar deal to offer his opinions to a design team that continues to lead the pack when it comes to the appearance of personal technology.
Though TIDAL certainly has a plethora of problems, it is at least getting more press coverage than Beats Music, and Apple likely recognized that acquiring Kanye to help them promote the platform would have been ideal. However, it seems that Kanye has no aspirations to work with the Silicon Valley company, at least not yet.
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