17 ms·

The App Store, Spotify, and Europe's thriving digital music market

56 points by dm 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dm 3y ago
European Commission's decision: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_1161 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...
nexneo 3y ago
Entire press release sounds like Spotify is some biggest company and Apple is a startup being crushed by Spotify. Apple's attitude towards developers complaining about App Store was largely "Deal with it" but seems like they themselves can't deal with it.
- beardyw 3y ago
  Ha, I didn't notice what the site was. I thought these folks have got the story wrong. Maybe that's how they think.
- goosedragons 3y ago
  I do find it hilarious that Apple expects companies to fork over 30% of the price of renting a movie in an app and considers that "fair" and then on platforms where THEY would have to fork over 30% (e.g., Apple TV app on Google TV) they don't let you rent at all. So everyone gets a shittier worse experience everywhere on the off-chance they can extract rent.
andrejguran 3y ago
The press release somehow forgot to touch the core of the fine: apple customers paid higher subscription fee for apple music than they would for Spotify because it's against app store policy to inform that Spotify has a cheaper subscription if they don't want to pay apple 30% cut...
- nojito 3y ago
  Spotify doesn’t pay Apple anything and yet has a 56% share of the EU market.
  - soziawa 3y ago
    The market share of iOS in the EU is only around 35% though. The market this is about isn't the market for music streaming apps but the market for iOS apps.
  - amf12 3y ago
    I noticed this narrative in their press release. They don't really mention Spotifys share just on iOS. If it's less than 56%, clearly something's up, right?
andreime 3y ago
Apple fights hard to not allow users to install from other sources on devices they own, so they can charge rent from developers, then complains when some apps that are too big for them to control are installed from the sole app store. The solution is pretty simple, let people use the devices they own as they want; allow multiple app stores; allow people to download binaries and install on their devices.
- tambourine_man 3y ago
  Or, let people choose the other platform that already allows them just that. What some people may not understand is that a large percentage of Apple customers are buying iPhones because of those restrictions and not in spite of them.
  - lapcat 3y ago
    > What some people may not understand is that a large percentage of Apple customers are buying iPhones because of those restrictions and not in spite of them. Citation needed. Do you have polls or other consumer research to back this claim?
    - tambourine_man 3y ago
      I have 70% of Android global market share. It offers more choices of devices, price points and a less restrictive OS. There's almost nothing you can do on an iPhone that you can't on an Android. Conversely, there are plenty of things that the more open Android platform allows that iOS doesn't. And yet, despite all of that, some people still prefer to buy iPhones. I think it's their choice to make.
      - lapcat 3y ago
        > There's almost nothing you can do on an iPhone that you can't on an Android. 1. This is false. There are plenty of features and apps (including my own apps!) that are exclusive to iPhone. iMessage and iCloud for example. 2. Products are not simply lists of features. There's also something important called design. 3. Don't forget vendor hardware support, software support, and resale value. I can say, from a personal perspective, that I didn't buy an iPhone because it's vendor locked. I bought an iPhone because I'm a Mac user and developer, so I was already in the Apple ecosystem. I suspect that there are a lot of people who buy an iPhone simply because their family and/or friends have iPhones already.
SushiHippie 3y ago
Related submission on the frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39589483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39589483
s_dev 3y ago
>and pays Apple nothing for the services that have helped make them one of the most recognizable brands in the world. It says a lot that the €100 developer fee (I'd imagine Spotify pay for multiple licences in multiple countries) that Apple consider it nothing. It probably is 'negligible' given the size of Spotify but also don't even consider highly popular apps like Spotify 'contributing' to App Store ecosystem that has also helped Apple. Their press statements are starting to become more and more snarky. They would do better to keep their chin up and keep going. This sort of snark is more befitting of Ryanair than Apple.
- piva00 3y ago
  Apple is not taking in consideration that the argument works completely in reverse, without all the apps paying them a 30% cut, or developers investing time into creating apps for their ecosystem there would be no iOS in 2024.
  - occz 3y ago
    They are working the narrative as hard as they can.
  - mohamedattahri 3y ago
    I don't think this is a valid argument, because both sides of it are true. Developers invested, but so did Apple, and they did it first and took bigger risks. The App Store is packed with apps because developers saw an opportunity and wanted to seize it. Everyone's in it because it serves their interests.
    - addicted 3y ago
      This is a reversal of history. The iPhone released without an App Store. Their original plan was very clearly to limit it to web apps. Apple, including Steve Jobs, spent a lot of time and energy explaining why web apps were the best option. And then Apple realized, largely through apps developed for jailbroken phones which led to a lot of people jailbreaking their phones, that for iOS to really succeed they needed apps. Windows Phone 7 is another example of this. It was a superior OS to iOS by most measures. It died almost entirely because of the lack of major apps. If major app providers (Google, Spotify, Netflix, etc) had never made their apps available on iOS and had made them available on Android instead iOS would probably be looking like Windows Phone 7 right now.
Aldo_MX 3y ago
If Apple wanted to destroy Spotify they would simply drop prices by 30%, and Spotify would be unable to compete with that pricing because of the Apple tax. Why should Apple have that much leverage? They didn't even "build the platform", they took an Open Source platform, put the Apple logo to it, and then proceeded to EEE like good old Microsoft. Apple is in the wrong here, or they charge the Apple tax to music apps, or they have Apple music. They can't have both. OTOH, I don't see Apple paying 30% of their revenue to the Open Source maintainers that made "the platform" possible.
- ralfd 3y ago
  So you are arguing that companies should avoid using open source?
  - Aldo_MX 3y ago
    No, I'm arguing that if Apple feels entitled to steal 30% of my hard earned money, then the open source maintainers should also feel the same entitlement, because without their work there would be no iOS, and no App Store. Apple owes their existence to the Open Source maintainers the same way Apple claims I owe my existence to their proprietary APIs.
    - rob74 3y ago
      That may be true, but those suckers (the open source maintainers) chose to give their work away for free, so they deserve what they get (nothing). Apple won't be making the same mistake! (sorry for the sarcasm)
    - Someone 3y ago
      > No, I'm arguing that if Apple feels entitled to steal 30% of my hard earned money, then the open source maintainers should also feel the same entitlement If the people who explicitly stated “feel free to use my software for free for any purpose you see fit” feel entitled to get any money for the stuff they wrote, they shouldn’t have said that, and, I expect, Apple would have used something else. Writing a halfway decent OS kernel isn’t that hard, and performance-wise, you don’t really need more than halfway decent). Also, Apple paid for many of the higher layers of iOS and/or developed them in-house (NeXT wrote NeXTSTEP, Apple bought NeXT, and then spent years before releasing Mac OS X)
leetharris 3y ago
These last few legal responses from Apple are really damaging their "cool" factor. Apple has, for some time now, succeeded by staying quiet and just shipping high quality stuff. Their PR / legal team acting like children when they don't get what they want is a genuine harm to their brand. It's amazing to me that these press releases are approved.
- txdv 3y ago
  The rent seeking has begun
- lozenge 3y ago
  They once had to put a notice on their website for 2 weeks in the UK due to losing a Samsung design patent case. Their non compliance was impressive. They changed the website to ensure users wouldn't see the footer with the link without scrolling. Then they edited the notice's wording by adding paragraphs in the middle of it - and sentences in the middle of paragraphs. I really think there's some Americanism behind it. Like, "we don't care what you foreign authorities think".
- TillE 3y ago
  It's a really weird return to the Steve Jobs attitude towards problems like this. Except then it was usually literally Steve writing statements and saying those things, and now it's just a faceless Apple Inc which is even less sympathetic. I don't know who these statements are for, aside from the most devoted Apple fans. I feel like investors would be happier with shorter, more professional communication.
  - addicted 3y ago
    Steve Jobs never did it publicly. He pulled some childish moves that the public found out about (Engadget being banned from reporting on Apple when a reporter wrote about an iPhone prototype they found in a bar or something is one of the next examples I can think of) but it wasn’t Apple officially behaving childishly in public.
  - jerojero 3y ago
lapcat 3y ago
> Today, developers compete on a level playing field on the App Store. > We’ve even flown our engineers to Stockholm to help Spotify’s teams in person. Some level playing field. Apple certainly hasn't flown any engineers to my town.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mohamedattahri 3y ago
There's not a single mention of Apple Music. There goes the credibility of this statement. It's rather obvious that problems started when Apple decided to build a services business the size of a F100 company by directly and unfairly competing with said developers, unchained from all the constraints and costs they impose on them.
ghusto 3y ago
Cool. Now explain why my iPhone has FLAC codecs built in, but the Apple Music app refuses to play it (the file manager can play it natively, no extra software like VLC needed). I'm sure it has nothing to do with ALAC. No Apple, you deliberately cripple the competition all the time — especially with music — and you're getting what you deserve.
l2dy 3y ago
> If a developer sells physical goods, serves ads in their app, or just shares an app for free, they don’t pay Apple anything. If so, don't ask me to pay $99 every year for installing my own app on a device I bought. Apps signed with a free developer account are severely limited with a short validity period and Apple enforces a limit on the number of apps that could be installed this way on a device.

56 points by dm 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

dm 3y ago

European Commission's decision: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_1161 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_...

nexneo 3y ago

Entire press release sounds like Spotify is some biggest company and Apple is a startup being crushed by Spotify. Apple's attitude towards developers complaining about App Store was largely "Deal with it" but seems like they themselves can't deal with it.

beardyw 3y ago
Ha, I didn't notice what the site was. I thought these folks have got the story wrong. Maybe that's how they think.
goosedragons 3y ago
I do find it hilarious that Apple expects companies to fork over 30% of the price of renting a movie in an app and considers that "fair" and then on platforms where THEY would have to fork over 30% (e.g., Apple TV app on Google TV) they don't let you rent at all. So everyone gets a shittier worse experience everywhere on the off-chance they can extract rent.

andrejguran 3y ago

The press release somehow forgot to touch the core of the fine: apple customers paid higher subscription fee for apple music than they would for Spotify because it's against app store policy to inform that Spotify has a cheaper subscription if they don't want to pay apple 30% cut...

nojito 3y ago
Spotify doesn’t pay Apple anything and yet has a 56% share of the EU market.
- soziawa 3y ago
  The market share of iOS in the EU is only around 35% though. The market this is about isn't the market for music streaming apps but the market for iOS apps.
- amf12 3y ago
  I noticed this narrative in their press release. They don't really mention Spotifys share just on iOS. If it's less than 56%, clearly something's up, right?

andreime 3y ago

Apple fights hard to not allow users to install from other sources on devices they own, so they can charge rent from developers, then complains when some apps that are too big for them to control are installed from the sole app store. The solution is pretty simple, let people use the devices they own as they want; allow multiple app stores; allow people to download binaries and install on their devices.

tambourine_man 3y ago
Or, let people choose the other platform that already allows them just that. What some people may not understand is that a large percentage of Apple customers are buying iPhones because of those restrictions and not in spite of them.
- lapcat 3y ago
  > What some people may not understand is that a large percentage of Apple customers are buying iPhones because of those restrictions and not in spite of them. Citation needed. Do you have polls or other consumer research to back this claim?
  - tambourine_man 3y ago
    I have 70% of Android global market share. It offers more choices of devices, price points and a less restrictive OS. There's almost nothing you can do on an iPhone that you can't on an Android. Conversely, there are plenty of things that the more open Android platform allows that iOS doesn't. And yet, despite all of that, some people still prefer to buy iPhones. I think it's their choice to make.
    - lapcat 3y ago
      > There's almost nothing you can do on an iPhone that you can't on an Android. 1. This is false. There are plenty of features and apps (including my own apps!) that are exclusive to iPhone. iMessage and iCloud for example. 2. Products are not simply lists of features. There's also something important called design. 3. Don't forget vendor hardware support, software support, and resale value. I can say, from a personal perspective, that I didn't buy an iPhone because it's vendor locked. I bought an iPhone because I'm a Mac user and developer, so I was already in the Apple ecosystem. I suspect that there are a lot of people who buy an iPhone simply because their family and/or friends have iPhones already.

SushiHippie 3y ago

Related submission on the frontpage: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39589483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39589483

s_dev 3y ago

>and pays Apple nothing for the services that have helped make them one of the most recognizable brands in the world. It says a lot that the €100 developer fee (I'd imagine Spotify pay for multiple licences in multiple countries) that Apple consider it nothing. It probably is 'negligible' given the size of Spotify but also don't even consider highly popular apps like Spotify 'contributing' to App Store ecosystem that has also helped Apple. Their press statements are starting to become more and more snarky. They would do better to keep their chin up and keep going. This sort of snark is more befitting of Ryanair than Apple.

piva00 3y ago
Apple is not taking in consideration that the argument works completely in reverse, without all the apps paying them a 30% cut, or developers investing time into creating apps for their ecosystem there would be no iOS in 2024.
- occz 3y ago
  They are working the narrative as hard as they can.
- mohamedattahri 3y ago
  I don't think this is a valid argument, because both sides of it are true. Developers invested, but so did Apple, and they did it first and took bigger risks. The App Store is packed with apps because developers saw an opportunity and wanted to seize it. Everyone's in it because it serves their interests.
  - addicted 3y ago
    This is a reversal of history. The iPhone released without an App Store. Their original plan was very clearly to limit it to web apps. Apple, including Steve Jobs, spent a lot of time and energy explaining why web apps were the best option. And then Apple realized, largely through apps developed for jailbroken phones which led to a lot of people jailbreaking their phones, that for iOS to really succeed they needed apps. Windows Phone 7 is another example of this. It was a superior OS to iOS by most measures. It died almost entirely because of the lack of major apps. If major app providers (Google, Spotify, Netflix, etc) had never made their apps available on iOS and had made them available on Android instead iOS would probably be looking like Windows Phone 7 right now.

Aldo_MX 3y ago

If Apple wanted to destroy Spotify they would simply drop prices by 30%, and Spotify would be unable to compete with that pricing because of the Apple tax. Why should Apple have that much leverage? They didn't even "build the platform", they took an Open Source platform, put the Apple logo to it, and then proceeded to EEE like good old Microsoft. Apple is in the wrong here, or they charge the Apple tax to music apps, or they have Apple music. They can't have both. OTOH, I don't see Apple paying 30% of their revenue to the Open Source maintainers that made "the platform" possible.

ralfd 3y ago
So you are arguing that companies should avoid using open source?
- Aldo_MX 3y ago
  No, I'm arguing that if Apple feels entitled to steal 30% of my hard earned money, then the open source maintainers should also feel the same entitlement, because without their work there would be no iOS, and no App Store. Apple owes their existence to the Open Source maintainers the same way Apple claims I owe my existence to their proprietary APIs.
  - rob74 3y ago
    That may be true, but those suckers (the open source maintainers) chose to give their work away for free, so they deserve what they get (nothing). Apple won't be making the same mistake! (sorry for the sarcasm)
  - Someone 3y ago
    > No, I'm arguing that if Apple feels entitled to steal 30% of my hard earned money, then the open source maintainers should also feel the same entitlement If the people who explicitly stated “feel free to use my software for free for any purpose you see fit” feel entitled to get any money for the stuff they wrote, they shouldn’t have said that, and, I expect, Apple would have used something else. Writing a halfway decent OS kernel isn’t that hard, and performance-wise, you don’t really need more than halfway decent). Also, Apple paid for many of the higher layers of iOS and/or developed them in-house (NeXT wrote NeXTSTEP, Apple bought NeXT, and then spent years before releasing Mac OS X)

leetharris 3y ago

These last few legal responses from Apple are really damaging their "cool" factor. Apple has, for some time now, succeeded by staying quiet and just shipping high quality stuff. Their PR / legal team acting like children when they don't get what they want is a genuine harm to their brand. It's amazing to me that these press releases are approved.

txdv 3y ago
The rent seeking has begun
lozenge 3y ago
They once had to put a notice on their website for 2 weeks in the UK due to losing a Samsung design patent case. Their non compliance was impressive. They changed the website to ensure users wouldn't see the footer with the link without scrolling. Then they edited the notice's wording by adding paragraphs in the middle of it - and sentences in the middle of paragraphs. I really think there's some Americanism behind it. Like, "we don't care what you foreign authorities think".
TillE 3y ago
It's a really weird return to the Steve Jobs attitude towards problems like this. Except then it was usually literally Steve writing statements and saying those things, and now it's just a faceless Apple Inc which is even less sympathetic. I don't know who these statements are for, aside from the most devoted Apple fans. I feel like investors would be happier with shorter, more professional communication.
- addicted 3y ago
  Steve Jobs never did it publicly. He pulled some childish moves that the public found out about (Engadget being banned from reporting on Apple when a reporter wrote about an iPhone prototype they found in a bar or something is one of the next examples I can think of) but it wasn’t Apple officially behaving childishly in public.
- jerojero 3y ago

lapcat 3y ago

> Today, developers compete on a level playing field on the App Store. > We’ve even flown our engineers to Stockholm to help Spotify’s teams in person. Some level playing field. Apple certainly hasn't flown any engineers to my town.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

mohamedattahri 3y ago

There's not a single mention of Apple Music. There goes the credibility of this statement. It's rather obvious that problems started when Apple decided to build a services business the size of a F100 company by directly and unfairly competing with said developers, unchained from all the constraints and costs they impose on them.

ghusto 3y ago

Cool. Now explain why my iPhone has FLAC codecs built in, but the Apple Music app refuses to play it (the file manager can play it natively, no extra software like VLC needed). I'm sure it has nothing to do with ALAC. No Apple, you deliberately cripple the competition all the time — especially with music — and you're getting what you deserve.

l2dy 3y ago

> If a developer sells physical goods, serves ads in their app, or just shares an app for free, they don’t pay Apple anything. If so, don't ask me to pay $99 every year for installing my own app on a device I bought. Apps signed with a free developer account are severely limited with a short validity period and Apple enforces a limit on the number of apps that could be installed this way on a device.