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Addressing Spotify’s Claims

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Re: Addressing Spotify’s Claims

#181

Post by playpause »

hjk05 wrote: post #160
ahmedalsudani wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not exactly. You're free to buy from other stores, and suppliers can sell to them. A very important distinction.

Same story with phones. You are free to buy from other suppliers. But you can’t walk into a Walmart and buy milk from whole foods on their shelf’s, even if you feel that would be great for you personally because Walmart is closer but you prefer Whole Foods.

Users can’t reasonably be expected to switch smartphone hardware just because of an app. The smartphone hardware market has its own constraints (people generally own only one at a time, they upgrade it every couple of years at a cost of several hundred dollars, etc). Apple may have legitimately earned its position in that hardware market by making products people want, but it’s not legitimate for them to use that dominance to control wholesalers’ access to consumers in a separate marketplace: music streaming. In that marketplace, the relative success of Apple Music vs Spotify should be based on consumer preferences for those services, not on which company also happens to dominate a separate marketplace. See also: Microsoft using its OS market dominance to control the web browser market.

Re: Addressing Spotify’s Claims

#182

Post by andromeduck »

laumars wrote: post #127
isostatic wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly what my local store does. They pay the wholesaler 10 and sell to me for 15.

That’s also why high street stores are now struggling while consumers are buying direct from the source or online where margins are tighter. However I’m not suggesting that local stores are in the wrong either but it does illustrate how consumers have choice there is no such competition inside Apples walled garden. And that is the real crux of why their margins are high: it’s because developers and iPhone owners are…

Apple's walled garden is _A_ store. One of several.

Re: Addressing Spotify’s Claims

#183

Post by fauigerzigerk »

threeseed wrote: post #145
weego wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a case of morals, but 30% at apples scale is fairly egregious.

Pretty cheap actually for distribution channels. If Spotify were selling their products through retail they would probably lose about 50% of their margins.

I don't know how you arrive at that conclusion unless you seriously compare physical with digital distribution.

Retail margins are famously low (very low single digits).

The problem is that Apple and Google are exploiting their mobile content distribution oligopoly so aggressively that they are practically begging for a regulatory crackdown.

I wonder why companies are getting carried away with this kind of profit destroying greed again and again. They are killing their own golden goose.

Re: Addressing Spotify’s Claims

#185

Post by thegayngler »

infinity0 wrote: post #151
thegayngler wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow! Thats a new one. Pay the open source world who Apple have been heavy contributors to themselves. Apple are such hypocrites indeed.

They contribute to specific open source projects with a long-term view to undercutting other open source projects that are more independent of Apple. That is far from being "nice" or "contributing back". Have you heard of "dumping"? What Apple does in its FOSS contributions is a similar thing - pour a ton of developer resources into critical FOSS projects so that they eventually control the development process and cl…

Every company uses and contributes open source if they believe there is a business case for it. No one is immune from that fact.

I’m sorry but the whole open source claim is weak because the musicians aren’t releasing their product as free to use by anyone. Why would you otherwise need anti piracy measures like Spotify if the music was free to use to begin with?

Re: Addressing Spotify’s Claims

#186

Post by wodenokoto »

emsy wrote: post #176

I've mentioned this in a reply but I think it's worth pointing out as its own comment to gather thoughts on this: What if Microsoft would take 30% of every transaction that is done via Windows? And if the sellers don't comply they gets kicked off the platform. That's essentially what Apple is doing, but I'm pretty sure if Microsoft was the one doing it the would be far fewer apologists. In fact, I very much think Mic…

These are very good points. My loosely connected thoughts on this:

We originally accepted this from Apple, because we didn't consider phones as "real" computing devices.

Apple would get in a lot of trouble, with no apologist left to defend them, if they turned MacOS into an app-store-only platform.

I feel like the major benefit of app-store for consumers is the curation of "good actors". What would be the consequences of adware if the protected app stores were let loose? On one hand I fear it would go completely off the rails, on the other hand it is already worse today on mobile apps than on PC/mac-apps, so can it really get worse? Would better access to opensource apps help alleviate the adware problem?

Re: Addressing Spotify’s Claims

#187

Post by millstone »

infinity0 wrote: post #151
thegayngler wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow! Thats a new one. Pay the open source world who Apple have been heavy contributors to themselves. Apple are such hypocrites indeed.

They contribute to specific open source projects with a long-term view to undercutting other open source projects that are more independent of Apple. That is far from being "nice" or "contributing back". Have you heard of "dumping"? What Apple does in its FOSS contributions is a similar thing - pour a ton of developer resources into critical FOSS projects so that they eventually control the development process and cl…

Apple has no grand plans to dominate open source, that's silly. All of Apple's OSS contributions can be easily understood as solving Apple's needs.

Apple's LLVM involvement is not driven by spite towards the GPL; Apple simply needed a compiler that was compatible with their business model. Likewise they started WebKit so as not to be dependent on MS for a browser, and Swift because they wanted a successor to aging ObjC.

Apple does not have a monopoly in any market.

Re: Addressing Spotify’s Claims

#188

Post by kodablah »

nolok wrote: post #86
est wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so the AppStore policy is selective?

Is this a real question (genuinely asking) ? Apple applying its policy differently for some apps, or chosing to re-interpret some of their policies randomly for some apps, is not an uncommon complaint and was a big part of spotify's original complaing.

It's a real question because the linked statement explicitly states the same rules are applied to all apps. One who may not acknowledge the obvious falsehoods can be excused for assuming the same rules are applied to all when told that's the case.

Re: Addressing Spotify’s Claims

#189

Post by infinity0 »

ms013 wrote: post #110
infinity0 wrote: post #15

> What Spotify is demanding is something very different. After using the App Store for years to dramatically grow their business, Spotify seeks to keep all the benefits of the App Store ecosystem — including the substantial revenue that they draw from the App Store’s customers — without making any contributions to that marketplace. Please Apple, pay all the open source projects that you use, a fair share of the reven…

They owe nothing for anything they legitimately use: that’s the consequence of open source licensing as a developer. If a developer expects a project to get a fair share of revenue from projects that use it, they are free to adopt a licensing model that dictates that. That is a perfectly reasonable licensing model. I get it: I had an open source project that HP built a product around many years ago, but modulo a coup…

The fact that they set up the legal structure of the "App Store" in a more restrictive/monopolistic way than traditional GNU/Linux package repositories, is no excuse if they are going to start playing the "moral" card like in OP's link.

They benefit substantially from open source and give very little back in concrete financial terms, yet complain that Spotify is asking the same thing and portray them as freeloaders. In reality, Apple are doing far more freeloading off of other projects than Spotify is doing off of them, legal or no.

What Apple have created in the App Store (a software package repository on an OS platform) is a monopolistic trust over what should be a free marketplace, like how regular GNU/Linux package repositories have worked for decades. This is exactly what "anti-trust" is supposed to prevent and the DoJ need to have the balls to start breaking up tech companies for this shit, just like they almost did to Microsoft.

Re: Addressing Spotify’s Claims

#190

Post by wodenokoto »

Why can I buy train tickets on iOS apps using any payment provider, but not spotify-subscription?

It can't be that it is a subscription service, because I can also buy commuter-tickets as a subscription service using CC.

Is it that you can't sell competing services on app-store without paying apple tax or is there an arbitrary list of services that requires apple tax?

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