On Tuesday night, as most of New york was watching Barack Obama and Mitt Romney square up on CNN, Dr Dre was hosting a party at the Darby, a favoured haunt of rappers which featured in American Psycho. The hip hop entrepreneur was celebrating the success of his audio business, The Beats by Dr Dre.

A platoon of beautiful “hostesses” served martinis, champagne and steak Beats By Dr. Dre, completely unadorned — whether as a statement or through oversight, we couldn’t be sure. Dre sat in a corner booth with his entourage, including his wife Nicole; his bodyguards; his business partner Jimmy Iovine, the veteran producer of John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen and U2 and American Idol mentor; and his chief operating officer, Luke Wood.

Before long, the hip hop kingpin P Diddy joined them too, wearing a long-sleeved Nirvana T-shirt. He and Dre had a conspicuous conference at the side of the room. These days, Diddy runs the vodka brand Ciroc, which helped him earn an estimated $45 million last year. According to Forbes magazine, Dre made more than three times that amount. Clearly, no one gets rich from actually making records any more.

Dr Dre, 47, was born Andre Young in Los angeles, and first made his name with the fierce rap group, NWA. After releasing his ground-breaking solo album The Chronic in 1992, he launched the careers of Snoop Dogg, Eminem and 50 Cent among others, before launching The Beats with Iovine in 2008.

Since then they have cornered more than half of the $1 billion headphones market, according to retail analysts NDP. A tie-in deal with handset manufacturer HTC in August made Dre and Iovine $100 million each, and they have also signed deals with Hewlett-Packard, Chrysler and Fiat. From the number of Beats logos you see around the necks of Londoners on the Tube, it’s a surprise that the headphones retail for around £250 per pair.

Even if Bose remains the preferred choice of many audiophiles, The Beats has won the marketing war hands down — go to any popular holiday destination and you’ll see traders hawking fakes alongside knock-off Louis Vuitton bags. An early decision was made to treat the headphones as if they were Eminem or U2, to “give them a personality”, as Iovine puts it. These years,as most of people buy hermes outlet handbags online website.They are think it’s cheaper.

Dre’s “brand ambassadors” include major investor will. i. am, basketball player LeBron James, teenage heart-throb Justin Bieber and Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. During the Olympics, The Beats set up a temporary embassy in Shoreditch House to distribute the headphones to selected athletes.

It was a flippant article that i wrote about this — something about how the IOC forgot about Dre when signing its sponsorship deals — that led to my invitation to New york. So i found myself representin’ all the Leonard Cohen fans from across the world.

The day began with Dre announcing three new products — the company’s first as a “fully autonomous” entity (it now has its own manufacturing plant in China). There is a pair of earphones, urBeats, which retail at £89. 95. There is puissant little speaker capsule, roughly the size of a stoat, which connects to music players via Bluetooth. It is shaped like a pill — a nod to Dr Dre’s falsified medical credentials — and goes for £169. 95. Then there is The Executive, a set of noise-cancelling headphones that cost £269. 95.

It was the shift from records to hardware that Dre so successfully pounced on. When the file-sharing site Napster was emerging, Iovine called him to lament what it was doing to the record business. Dre was far more concerned about what it was doing for audio — that teenagers downloading music for free were listening to it on tinny computer speakers.

“A lot of people either don’t know or don’t care about sound quality, ” he told us. “It’s one thing to steal music — it’s another to destroy it. ”

With the launch of the ipod and iTunes, Apple got people to pay for the music but did not solve the audio problem. As Iovine likes to point out, a $400 ipod comes with 30¢ earphones. Since both men spent most of their careers in studios, obsessing about sound, this bothered them. Iovine told me how he once vacuumed Phil Spector’s studio in the belief that changing the direction of the bristles on the carpet would improve the acoustics. Dre added that he had been trying to tune the speakers in his car for 20 years. “I’ve almost got it right, ” he said.

Naturally, the cheap white ear-buds were a bit of a problem for the more bass-heavy productions for which Dre is famed. For Luke Wood, who has worked with Nirvana, Elliott Smith and Bright Eyes, it is just as much of a problem in alternative rock.You need learn vocabulery relate to sales and hermes birkin handbags.

“I signed TV on the Radio. Dear Science is my favourite album of the past 10 years — but it just didn’t sell, ” he told me.

“That music has a lot going on technically. You need to be able to hear all the counterpoint, for it to make sense — and that’s the first thing to go on computer speakers. For traditional pop music, it’s the vocal that tells the story, so bad audio really favours basic pop vocals. ”

In other words, cheap audio equipment was favouring cheap music. It didn’t matter which genre. “All the Beats people, we’re all one constituent. The idea of anything being broken down by genre is irrelevant to us now. We’re clearly all going in one direction, ” said Wood.

Late at night, downstairs at Darby’s, everything was moving in what you’d have to describe as a hip hop direction. Records by Ludacris, Drake and Kanye West rumbled a wall-high speaker. I got into a conversation with a banker — who seemed to want me to be his “wingman” as he hit on one of the hostesses — and somehow wound up in the roped-off area reserved for Beats executives.

Dre was sitting on the back of a bench with his wife before a table laden with brandy and vodka. Iovine, wearing a backwards baseball cap, looked a little weary. I asked him if it bothered him that all the fuss now centred on hardware, rather than singers.

“Right now, the model of the record business is a mess and it needs to be corrected, ” he said in a Brooklyn drawl. “We wanna move the model on. The first thing we need to do is get people to hear what’s there. Everyone else made headphones that looked like dental equipment and sounded like crap. So we’re proud of the fact that we got an entire generation with good headphones, whether they’re ours or not. Selling an wholesale mac makeup.

“We’re such a big marketing company that you can get lost in that. But at the core of it, Dre and I have 60 years in recording studios. I walked into a demo today and one of the girls who was working for us was playing the wrong song — a song that didn’t represent the speakers. I can’t stop that. But whatever gets people listening to music properly, that’s fine. Then you can start rebuilding the record business.

He hinted at a new online subscription service that would mark phase two in the Beats’ bid for “total sonic domination”.

“I think there’s gonna be a solution in the form of subscription. But in order to sell subscriptions, you have to sell a service. You can’t just sell a utility. How do you wade through 12 million songs? Why would you pay for that? It’s about curation. ”

Dr Dre came past, leaving early, to be fresh for his morning workout. He gave me a firm handshake, thanked me for coming, and left without comment, looking quietly satisfied.

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