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Apple Gets Antitrust Scrutiny Over Music Deals
An anonymous reader writes: Bloomberg reports that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is probing Apple after its acquisition of Beats Electronics, and its various deals with record labels to sell music through the iTunes store. As part of the acquisition, Apple now owns the music streaming service created by Beats, and they're planning to release a new version sometime soon. This makes their ties to the record labels, already deep because of iTunes, even stronger — and could affect the labels' relationships with other streaming services, like Spotify. Investigators want to know if Apple is using these business deals as leverage for "curtailing ad-supported music and pushing more songs into paid tiers of service at higher rates."
There was no real Apple monopoly. When Apple came out with the first iPod, its competition was the CD player sized Nomad Jukebox, Compaq's hard disk player (yes... Compaq was the first company to make a hard disk based MP3 player), and Sony with their "MP3" players (which either transcoded to ATRAC3, or added a DRM wrapper to files.)
Apple's first iPod used MusicMatch and then in their next rev, bought out Casady & Greene's player.
In reality, at this time, Sony had the music player industry by the short hairs. They had minidisk players, Walkmans, CD players, as well as the above mentioned "MP3" players. Apple just started with one device. Another potential monopoly would have been MS's PlaysForSure, which everyone but Apple and Archos signed up for.
As for DRM, Apple's was the least onerous. Worst case, burn a playlist to a CD-RW, rip it back in, and call it done. This was a lot better than Sony's OpenMG player which didn't allow copying of music, period. It allowed checkins and checkouts, and would only allow each song to be checked out three times.
Now, the use of a MP3 player is limited. Maybe for jogging where having a phone is awkward. Even now, there are still non-Apple MP3 players on the shelf which are usable for exercising when one doesn't want to destroy their phone by sweat running down the phone jack into the device, frying it.
"Sources also indicated that Apple offered to pay YouTube’s music licensing fee to Universal Music Group if the label stopped allowing its songs on YouTube. Apple is seemingly trying to clear a path before its streaming service launches, which is expected to debut at WWDC in June. If Apple convinces the labels to stop licensing freemium services from Spotify and YouTube, it could take out a significant portion of business from its two largest music competitors."
http://www.theverge.com/2015/5...