True, Beats' revenues are large but nothing compared to Apple's. Beats revenues + Apple's huge cash pile make it an almost risk free deal as you say. I think the streaming Beats streaming service (which I use - I don't use their headphones) is actually very slick and underrated. We all know how bad Apple is at consumer cloud services so this part of the acquisition should be useful. It's also important to point out the investment Beats have made in their streaming service (the number of curated playlists they have and the quality of them is astonishing) and it would take Apple a long time to match that.