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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."
They likely do so, for legal purposes. For example, when Facebook or Google use their own advertising platforms to advertise to their visitors, they must pay just the same as anyone else would. Sure, it basically come out of the budget in one part of the company and goes into another, but it has to be done, and all applicable state and federal taxes must be paid too. It's not completely free to them, even on their own platforms.
What Apple doesn't want to admit - won't admit - is that their crappy Apple Music service could never compete with Spotify in a free and open market. That's why they do their best to try and prevent Spotify from working on iOS devices. They lock it out of Siri and they lock it out of integration with other devices.
Apple Music is a terrible, buggy service. On desktops, the only way to use it is iTunes, so enough said on that front. On iOS, the experience isn't much better. The Apple Music UI is notoriously terrible, to the point where Apple added a popup to explain how to turn shuffle on and off because just about no one could find it otherwise. (It involves scrolling up on a UI element that doesn't appear to be scrollable, and it's unclear why the controls are hidden anyway because they're already in a UI element you have to explicitly "pop up" to interact with anyway.) It's also buggy - streams frequently randomly stop, and the app will frequently randomly forget what you were doing and restart at the beginning of the "library" meaning that you'll be hearing a lot of whatever the first song in database order is.
Then there's the lack of discovery options. You're basically limited to Apple curated playlists on Apple Music. There's basically no option to just browse. If you don't know exactly what you're looking for, search will never find it. There's an option to stream music that's "similar" to other music but this frequently glitches out and crashes, and the songs it picks are incredibly random and unrelated to boot. It's just bad.
Spotify, on the other hand, presents a clean, usable interface and actually works. It remembers what you were doing. It provides a whole lot of discovery options, and you can follow curated playlists from people all over the world. In a truly free market, there's no way Apple Music in its current form could compete with Spotify.
So Apple doesn't bother competing. (This is why Apple Music might as well not exist on Android: there are too many other, better choices.) Instead they tightly integrate Apple Music and hope that by making using Spotify annoying enough, Apple users will use their service instead. And apparently it works, to some degree.
You have dramatically simplified Spotify's impact on music while ignoring Apple's. The amount of money artists get have nothing to do with the sums spotify are paying for access to the music. That is the bullshit from the industry which invented bullshit.
An *rights holder* with over a million streams would be receiving somewhere between $30000 and $84000 according to Spotify's current rate. If the artist is only getting $80 then I would really be looking at who is the middle man between Spotify and the artist.
A reference I found to an "artist" rather than a "rights holder" puts the figure closer to $10000
In the meantime Apple is here to help right? I mean for a million songs the "rights holders" would get a whopping $37000 from Apple which would really help those artists sleep at night.
And while it's nice to criticise Spotify for the money equation, maybe you should look at their balance sheet. After all they will cease to exist if they keep up their trend of endlessly losing money. Is it much of a surprise with little income, and passing more than all of their profits to the record industry they are somewhat pissed at the thought of paying Apple on top of that?
If Apple had a completely unlocked phone where multiple appmarketplaces could compete for customers they could charge a 90% cut for all I care. But when they lock out the competition it gets very shady. In my mind they are abusing their monopoly position just like Microsoft and Intel did in their heydays, to the detriment of us all.
I have an Apple iPhone; I'm on my second one. Prior to my first one I had an iPod Touch. I have deliberately chosen the iPhone over all of its Android competitors because of the way that Apple has built IOS and the way that Apple administers the app store. Although I appreciate being able to freely install and run software on my home computer, I also appreciate the "walled garden" approach on my phone as I want it to work more like an appliance and less like another system that I have to administer. I don't see how this could work as effectively without Apple's "monopoly" power over their app store. If I wasn't happy with that, I could easily have chosen a platform with an alternative approach, namely Android. Apple's "monopoly" is over their product and what can run on their product. In my opinion that control is PART OF THE PRODUCT and is one of the things that causes me to choose Apple over Android.