Upvote the fuck out of this.
Google does exactly the same thing with Chrome Extensions or Android Apps.
Spotify to Apple: Time to Play Fair
141–150 of 865 posts
Re: Spotify to Apple: Time to Play Fair
#142I guess now I know where Spotify's priorities have been over the last few years as their Android app regressed.
Your war with Apple seems to have distracted you from the one platform you are on good terms with. As a premium subscriber it's very frustrating to not be able to pause music on the lockscreen anymore. Or using the headphone controls. Or why a blocked song keeps being played in discover weekly. Get your act together or you'll lose your android customers to Apple too.
Re: Spotify to Apple: Time to Play Fair
#143Spotify asking someone else to play fair, ha, that really made my day... I mean, of all companies, Spotify. Their whole business model is built upon not playing fair with content creators.
It's a lot more nuanced than that.
The payout per play is basically different between free and premium users as they add more to the revenue shared by all the artists.
If you look at revenue for premium users, then it's probably much higher than that, but when you add free users, it will lower the average.
A solution you might think would be to remove the free-tier. But that will only do one thing: cut a (admittedly smaller) revenue stream for artists, cut a promotional stream for artists and less possibilities to upsale premium accounts to free users.
Someone who isn't even a free user will either not listen to music or pirate it. Is that preferable?
A lot of artists admit that Spotify pay-out per stream is certainly lower, but it's still dominating all the other streaming revenues, as long as you are actually an artist who has the potential to make any. Some unknown artist selling 1 CD for $10 on bandcamp with no listen on streaming services will probably think differently.
Re: Spotify to Apple: Time to Play Fair
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
A 30% cut is something that Spotify needs to pay to Apple for every user that subscribes to Spotify through Apple devices. This cost doesn't doesn't exist for PC users, for example. They probably could live with it but I can understand why it feels like an artificial cost that Apple came up with. It would be an understandable cost if they were selling the Spotify App through the App Store and using the actual store i…
How much does Spotify pay for "PC users"? Of course, they have Customer Acquisition costs there too. Google gets the money. Why do they not fight Google? Spotify got big through the apple app store channel. Now that they are big they start whining about the cost of the channel. If you don't like it, then don't use it?
I don't think Spotify complains about customer acquisition costs. They complain about having to give away 30% of their revenue forever. That's not the case on the PC, or anywhere else.
Re: Spotify to Apple: Time to Play Fair
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A 30% cut is something that Spotify needs to pay to Apple for every user that subscribe to Spotify through Apple devices Not so as I understand it. Only if you put the option to subscribe into your app in the app store. That cost doesn't exist for Mac or PC, but Apple doesn't heavily curate and have costs associated with the wild west of downloading apps from the web. > it doesn't weight anything to Apple There are…
> There are significant costs associated with the app store, no? Part of the reason users gravitate towards the iPhone is because you can download high quality apps without malware, viruses, etc. That should be covered by the one time fee that developers pay to Apple in order to publish apps into the App Store. I am not sure if a simple binary needs a 30% cut of the entire Spotify profit to keep up with the costs of…
I would be upset because I bought the hardware and they arbitrarily won't let my music from Spotify play on it while their own music does.
Remember it's my device, but theirs. Not apples. If they are going to allow third party apps then do so, but there's no technical reason to not allow the service.
Imagine Ford says you can only use a certain brand of tires on your new car, or can only buy tires through the dealership. That's what's going on here.
Re: Spotify to Apple: Time to Play Fair
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The issue of the 30% cut alone is enough for further investigation, Not really, it's 30% for everyone, not just Spotify.
Unless "everyone" also includes Apple Music, then it's anti-competitive.
That’s like demanding newpapers pay full price for ad space on their own pages. Just absurd. What does it even mean, Apple owns Apple Music.
Re: Spotify to Apple: Time to Play Fair
#147The claims in here are pretty wild, particularly around how Apple has favored its own products: - Apple blocked Spotify from working with Apple Watch - It blocked Spotify from building apps for HomePod - It blocked Spotify from building apps for Siri - It blocks Spotify updates on a regular basis - It blocked Spotify from using a podcasting API after it acquired 2x major podcasting companies I genuinely hope Europe t…
> Apple blocked Spotify from working with Apple Watch I'm not sure this is 100% true. From browsing the spotify support forums many moons ago, some guy had built a spotify playing app for the apple watch, but spotify squashed it. Given that some random dev could do this, it doesn't seem like apple prevented anything.
Spotify is available (on apple watch) now, for whatever that's worth... Took me about 2 minutes from reading the complaint to playing Spotify (already had an account) on my watch. That includes downloading from the store and then to the watch (which has in the past, with other apps, taken a while)
Re: Spotify to Apple: Time to Play Fair
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
More than a decade ago, the EU forced Microsoft to let people choose their browser on a Windows machine with a fresh install. Not only that but the list of choices was randomly sorted so that IE would not be the first listed. > Why do I have to allow you to develop software for my proprietary hardware, just because it's technically possible? Of course if you were Apple, you would not want to do it. But, that’s what a…
On my opinion there is no comparison with the dominance MS in the OS market and Apple, I think Apple’ market share is very far from the 90+% windows enjoyed
Apple has a monopoly on iOS devices, just like MS had on the PC.
Re: Spotify to Apple: Time to Play Fair
#149Can someone help me stop playing the world's smallest violin here? Spotify knowingly built a low margin business living in the pocket of the labels (who force Spotify towards razor thin margins) and Apple/Google (who have, since before Spotify launched, operated app stores for their platforms which are to some extent curated and which are not free market economies). Spotify feels aggrieved that Apple does not allow i…
I think you're wrong - Apple's behaviour in this instance is clearly an abuse of market power and I fully expect the European Commission to rule in Spotify's favour. Apple are directly competing with Spotify in the field of streaming music services via Apple Music. Apple's total control of the app store and their substantial share of the smartphone market means that they have a dominant market position within the mea…
I agree. I'm actually surprised it's taken someone this long to launch such an action in Europe, as it seems a fairly open and shut case given the precedent and EU law (especially that the EU holds monopoly behaviour to require the ability to "materially affect market pricing", and not to actually own a given percentage of the market, and actions in non-technology sector with market shares in the 40% are not uncommon).
Re: Spotify to Apple: Time to Play Fair
#150Just as Microsoft were stopped from shipping a browser with their OS, vendors should be prevented from shipping an App Store with their OS. You cant move to another platform without losing access to all your "purchases" - there is no free market. They have monopolies within ecosystems they created. They should be FORCED to have an open platform, with users able to access multiple 3rd party storefronts on multiple pla…
> Vendors should be prevented from shipping an App Store with their OS. So then how would a novice user get apps the first time they boot up their phone? They would have to know where to get apps from. That seems like an easy way for users to end up downloading a bunch of malware because they think it's the official Apple or Google app store when it's just a random website. Having a built in app store has huge advant…
EU style choice (which cost MS 700M)- Show list of available app stores