Apple’s strategy of generally holding the line at 99 cents per song revolutionized and helped commodify the music industry, but its iTunes Radio streaming service never quite caught on even as consumers have shifting from buying to renting their digital content with services like Pandora, Rdio, Amazon, and Netflix. Apple’s $3 billion acquisition of Beats is a step to catch up, particularly since cloud services is one of the areas that Apple has struggled with most in recent years.

Streaming media you don’t own, and digital music in particular, is a fickle market, sticking providers in between labels learning to cut a hard deal and consumers pushing for low prices and a wide selection. Pandora has struggled to make it work, even with a massive user base, while on the video side Netflix has found itself having to make massive cuts in its offerings. But it’s also the near future, and Apple was increasingly seeing itself on the wrong side of the fence with iTunes account sales dropping even as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and other stream-friendly services win over customers.

Turning that decline around and gaining streaming marketshare requires Apple to play catch up in a number of ways, which it has been ticking off one-by-one, including building a massive datacenter. The Beats deal gives it an existing (if small) user base, a popular brand name, and most importantly the executive heft and independence to attack the problem head on without Apple’s legacy iTunes business from holding it back.

In fact, it’s just that executive heft that Tim Cook emphasized in an interview with the New York Times:

Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, repeatedly emphasized the talent that Dr. Dre and Mr. Iovine would bring to Apple. He also praised the Beats music service, which has people create playlists for people to listen to. “These guys are really unique,” Mr. Cook said. “It’s like finding the precise grain of sand on the beach. They’re rare and very hard to find.”

Not that dissimilar to Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram, streaming was proving to be an almost existential threat to a part of Apple’s business, one that it found itself struggling to fight back against. Spending just a few percentage points of its overall value to help navigate the new wold of streaming could be, in Cook’s own words, be a “no brainer,” if it works. That’s particularly true since many of the streaming services have pushed their sign up, and crucially their payment, processes outside of Apple’s walled gardens, meaning that even when users are watching on their iPads, iPhones or Apple TVs, they’re becoming Netflix, Amazon, or Pandora customers less tied to the Apple ecosystem.

Powering some of that stiff competition is Spotify’s own hub in Boston, built on the acquisition of The Echo Nest, which users artificial intelligence and machine learning to better pair listeners with music they like, a critical differentiator between a streaming service that is easy to flip off and one that entices you to stay for just one more song.