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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."
Did no one ever consider this when the number of isles of MP3 players went from 5 to 0 in most electronic stores as the ipod ruled them all because that is the only hardware that itunes would work with? Seems like they should have perhaps looked into this years ago.. but I guess they did get caught trying to do the same thing with ebooks..