Spotify’s Apple Music complaint was a near decade in the making

“Spotify Technology SA latest complaint against Apple Inc. highlights the tensions that arise when a hardware powerhouse starts competing with companies that helped drive the appeal of its products in the first place,” Nate Lanxon reports for Bloomberg. “Spotify on Wednesday demanded that Apple should be probed by the European Union’s powerful antitrust agency over how it allegedly squeezes rival music streaming services.”
“it was an event in 2010 that fundamentally changed Spotify’s ability to compete with Apple for the attention of music lovers, and it was a something Apple itself instigated. Previously, third-party apps could not “run in the background.” This meant if you started playing music on Spotify and switched to reading email, Spotify would be forced to stop playing. This wasn’t so with Apple’s music app: it was allowed to multi-task,” Lanxon reports. “When Apple announced in June 2010 that its iOS 4 operating system would let third-party developers build multi-tasking features into their software, Spotify could update its app to mirror the functionality of its biggest rival. It did so within a week of iOS 4 being released to the public.”
“It created parity between the competing products,” Lanxon reports. “Apple and Spotify both had music apps that gave access to millions of songs, supported background playback, and let users download tracks for offline listening.”
MacDailyNews Take: There’s an interesting use of the word parity. Spotify’s library contains 15 million fewer songs than Apple Music’s comprehensive library of 50 million songs.
You’d have to be stupid to subscribe to Spotify when it has 40% fewer tracks than Apple Music for the same price. Apple Music boasts a catalog of 50 million songs; Spotify has just 30 million. Don’t be stupid. If you’re still subscribing to Spotify, it’s past time for you to cancel it and upgrade to Apple Music. (See also: How to move your Spotify playlists to Apple Music.)
“The Spotify app can be downloaded for free from Apple’s app store, but to subscribe to the premium paid-for service a user needs to navigate to a separate web browser and manually register,” Lanxon reports. “This is because Spotify doesn’t want Apple to take the 30-percent cut from subscriptions that purchases within the App Store are subject to. It’s the same reason e-books can’t be purchased directly within Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle app on the iPhone.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Again, this boils down to the fact that Spotify wants to use the platform that Apple built and maintains at great expense for free.
SEE ALSO:
Spotify files EU antitrust complaint against Apple – March 13, 2019
Samsung to preinstall Spotify on phones – March 8, 2019
Streaming services led by Apple Music account for 75 percent of the U.S. recording industry’s revenue – March 1, 2019
Apple Music now leads Spotify in the U.S., the No. 1 recorded music market – December 31, 2018