Tech

AT&T delays big push as glitch hits Beats Music

A massive marketing push to support Jimmy Iovine’s Beats Music has been delayed because of technical glitches with the service, The Post has learned.

The streaming music service, which aims to take on Spotify and its six million subscribers, suffered an outage in its first few days, several music industry sources said.

After just one day of service, Beats Music stopped signing up new customers after a flood of subscribers either caused the glitch or highlighted the tech snafu, the sources said.

AT&T, which is to offer a family plan where up to five people can subscribe for $14.99 a month, didn’t roll out its marketing plan Jan. 21 promoting Beats Music in its stores because of the glitch, sources said.

AT&T is pressing Iovine and Beats Music CEO Ian Rogers and President Luke Woods to iron out the problems, sources said.

The wireless carrier is still not promoting the new service in its stores.

Beats Music is said to be targeting a marketing launch for Friday — just two days before the Super Bowl, where it will use Ellen DeGeneres in an ad to promote the new service.

While the AT&T delay is short, it is embarrassing for Iovine, who did a series of media interviews plugging the service and had hosted a lavish Grammys party when it was expected that the service would be up and flying — but it was just as the glitch hit.

Indeed, hundreds of thousands of subscribers have already signed up — four times as many as had been expected — even without any marketing muscle.

“If you are experiencing an outage, it would be a good idea to notify your users instead of going radio silent,” one angry user caught in glitch-land wrote on the Beats Music customer support site.

“As we mentioned earlier, the massive volume of new registrations on opening day caused issues for a few listeners,” Rogers noted on the firm’s blog.

Beats Music is suffering from bugs largely as a result of the platform it is using, which was acquired from predecessor MOG, one music industry source said.

The bugs mean that, in some instances, music is slow to load.

In other cases, track numbers were incorrect as were the dates the music was released, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

“Due to overwhelming demand for Beats Music application, we’re now planning to launch our Beats family offer on Jan. 31,” AT&T said in a statement sent to The Post.

A spokesman for AT&T referred questions about the “high demand” issue to Beats Music.

Heavy promotion during the Grammys, an upcoming Super Bowl spot and the AT&T in-store marketing kickoff could have given Beats bosses even bigger headaches had it not delayed the hard marketing push to fix the problem.

Beats Music said it is resolving minor issues and claims it has rebuilt the MOG platform and invested in new technology.

The AT&T partnership has put Beats Music in position to gain a huge leg up on competitors, which include Spotify, Rdio and, to an extent, digital radio service Pandora.