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Apple Says Spotify Wants 'the Benefits of a Free App Without Being Free' (engadget.com)
Apple has responded to Spotify's European Commission (EC) complaint. In a press release, the company said that Spotify "seeks to keep all the benefits of the App Store ecosystem ... without making any contributions to that marketplace." It added that the App Store has generated $120 billion for developers while offering users a secure platform, and that Spotify is seeking to side to sidestep the rules that every other app follows. From a report: "Spotify has every right to determine their own business model, but we feel an obligation to respond when Spotify wraps its financial motivations in misleading rhetoric about who we are," the company wrote. Spotify's main argument was that Apple's own music service, Apple Music, isn't subject to the same restrictions of its own app. "[A]pps should be able to compete fairly on the merits, and not based on who owns the App Store," wrote CEO Daniel Ek. "We should all be subject to the same fair set of rules and restrictions -- including Apple Music." It added that Apple had often stymied it on app updates and locked it out of Apple services, "such as Siri, HomePod and Apple Watch." Finally, it noted that Apple had blocked communication with its own customers on things like special offers. In response, Apple addressed each complaint point by point, while criticizing Spotify's treatment of musicians and artists. It said that it has approved nearly 200 app updates, and "the only time we have requested adjustments is when Spotify has tried to sidestep the same rules that every app follows."
The TRUTH is, Spotify is ruining music in many ways by paying fractions of pennies in royalties. Some artists with millions of song plays have received on $80 for a year of royalties. Fix that, then stop trying to side step app store rules. They could be better and should be.
These artists are free NOT to be on Spotify if they think their music is worth more than that.
I doubt Google/Deezer/Apple and other competitors are paying much more.
Spotify pays $0.006 to $0.0084 per stream to the holder of music rights. That works out to $6000 to $8400 in royalty payments per million song plays. If the artist is only getting $80 for a song that's listened to millions of times in a year, their publisher is the one screwing them over. The publisher is keeping more than 99% of the royalty payments, passing on less than 1% to the artist.
(Sanity check: Spotify averaged 1.7 billion listening hours per month in 2015. At 3.5 minutes per song, that's 29 billion song plays per month, or 350 billion song plays per year. At the above royalty rates, they'd be paying about $2-$3 billion in royalties per year. And indeed that's about how much they pay in royalties - $3.9 billion in 2018. So yes, it is in fact the record labels who are screwing the artists over, not Spotify.)