Apple is making plans completely phase out the Beats Music brand, while still keeping its technology as a feature in their products. Per TechCrunch, Apple has not yet said when the Beats name will be eliminated or whether it will be done quickly or incrementally. The site credits several high-level Apple engineers as the source.

The report goes on to say that may Beats Music engineers have already been reassigned to other projects, while Ian Rogers, head of Beats Music, has received new duties as the head of iTunes Radio.

Apple initially acquired the Beats Music brand in May of 2014 for $3 billion. Beats music provides on-demand streaming of any song from the Beats music library for a monthly fee along with a similar radio-experience such as Pandora. Apple's senior vice president Eddy Cue lauded the Beats Music product as, "the first music subscription service done right." 

Despite this claim, before Apple purchased the brand, Beats had struggled to make a name for itself in the same space as Spotify, Rdio and others; this was despite the involvement of industry giants like Dr. Dre and Trent Reznor in addition to curated playlists. Three months after its launch, Beats Music sat at only 250,000 subscribers to 10 million on Spotify. 

Of course, those statistics are not entirely fair; Spotify has the benefit of being around for much longer and has thus had more time to build a brand for itself.

Initial reports claimed that Apple would be leaving the streaming music service completely, but this has since been proven false. Peter Kafka from Re/code made it clear that it will be just the branding that disappears while the music subscription service will remain for Apple to mold and shape into their own ideal image.

The act of a rebranding from a major purchase is not unheard of. Company acquisitions happen fairly often and are an opportunity take existing products or intellectual properties and rebrand it as something more uniform with the rest of the company's services. 

One possibility that has been considered by some tech experts has been folding the brand into iTunes. That would also tie into the company's desire to expand iTunes Radio and would keep Apple's musical offerings streamlined for consumers. It also does not make a lot of sense for the company to have two easily identified brands associated with music under their umbrella of technologies.

Apple is planning on capitalizing on its music shifts and is reportedly going to have a big music event in the first half of next year.