Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Addressing Spotify’s Claims

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 688 posts

Re: Addressing Spotify’s Claims

#151

Post by infinity0 »

thegayngler wrote: post #85
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…

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 claim they are "contributing to open source", but in the end everyone that depends on these projects have to follow the direction that they set. LLVM/Clang is perhaps one exception, but even the Apple parts of that project's history have very obvious goals of undermining GCC since they hate the GPL's guts, counterbalanced by the legitimate need for a FOSS competitor to GCC that attracts enough non-Apple influence in the LLVM/Clang project to balance out the Apple influence.

Re: Addressing Spotify’s Claims

#152

Post by xuki »

paxy wrote: post #90

Apple is also being misleading about the 30%/15% fee variance. They make it seem like Spotify's fees drop to 15% after it has been in the App Store for a year. In reality, it is only 15% if a user is renewing their annual subscription. For initial purchase of annual subscriptions or initial purchase+renewal of all other subscription durations the fee is still 30% indefinitely. And I'm willing to bet that the vast maj…

Doesn't matter if it's annually or monthly or weekly, once you pass the 1-year-mark it's 15%:

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/subscriptions/#revenue...

Re: Addressing Spotify’s Claims

#153

Post by pjmlp »

emsy wrote: post #141
pjmlp wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like other online book shops don't sell their books on the Kindle device store app.

That's not a good comparison. An iOS device is not like a book shop. The iBooks application is. Nobody's asking that you can buy Kindle books in iBooks, but you can't even buy Kindle books in the Kindle app because Apple would demand 30% of the book. If you open the Kindle app on Windows you can buy books in there and Microsoft doesn't take a cut of the sale. People would lose their mind over this. Why is Apple diffe…

You can import books via iTunes.

Re: Addressing Spotify’s Claims

#155

Post by laumars »

threeseed wrote: post #113
bad_user wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify would and does exist on all the other platforms, like Android, Windows or the open web. Apple created a lot of value with its first iPhone, but the world evolved since then. And yes, in your definition, Apple too is a middleman, because a big reason for why many people buy overpriced smartphones is to use apps. That you can't move those purchases easily to another platform, that's the lock-in effect of Apple'…

> That you can't move those purchases easily to another platform You do realise that there are technical reasons for that. You can't just lift an iOS, Linux, Windows, Android, PS4, Xbox etc app and just run it on a different platform. Especially if your target platform is a resource constrained one.

Indeed, however there is no technical reason why devices couldn’t be built so apps could be lift and shifted verbatim. We already have examples of cross platform frameworks that can target desktops as well as mobile devices. We have an understanding of how to reflow our content for different screen sizes, orientations, aspect ratios, and even (albeit less successfully) DPI. We also have platforms were code has to support different horsepower (eg games written for the Nintendo Switch between docked and undocked mode). So we understand the theory and I’m sure most developers would welcome such a change too. But there is absolutely no incentive for hardware manufacturers to do this (and I can’t blame them either).

To be honest though, I’m less concerned about app portability as I am about retaining ownership of apps after their or the app stores support has ended. While this doesn’t really matter for mobile apps nor music streaming services, it’s something that really concern me with regards to collecting retro games. There is a lot to be said for owning physical media. But I’ve digressed.

Re: Addressing Spotify’s Claims

#156

Post by kodablah »

isostatic wrote: post #130
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.

I use spotify and netflix without going through apple, the former on my linux desktop, the latter additionally on my smart tv.

Reads to me like you have to get in a different car to shop at those other stores because one of your cars only drives to one store.

Re: Addressing Spotify’s Claims

#157

Post by askmike »

close04 wrote: post #139
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.

Apple has ~15% market share (fluctuating) so it's not really a monopoly situation. Google will give you access to the exact same Spotify service. Whether what Apple is doing is legal or not I guess the courts will decide. But it's certainly factually incorrect to imply that you're not free to buy from anywhere else.

The Apple Store has 100% market share on all iPhones, iPads and iWatches.

I really don't see this being that much different from the famous United States v. Microsoft Corp. case[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

EDIT: comments have made clear that Windows had a monopoly on the personal computer space, whereas Apple doesn't have a monopoly on the smartphone or tablet space.

Re: Addressing Spotify’s Claims

#158

Post by headmelted »

To be fair, it does look like Spotify has clearly been selective with the facts in it's original post. Ok.

None of this response addresses the main question raised by the Spotify letter which is: "Is Apple abusing it's position as platform holder to grow it's own products over it's competitors?". Their silence on this, the core issue, speaks volumes.

No doubt a lot of people reading Apple's letter (and many in the media) will be taken in by the empty rhetoric around helping musicians and forget that the main story is about Apple's ability to monopolize media through the iPhone, and whether it has attempted to do so.

As far as this story goes I could not care less about Apple or Spotify (and I'm a customer of both).

I care about whether laws are being broken that exist to protect me from price gouging in the future.

Re: Addressing Spotify’s Claims

#159

Post by dannyw »

mehrdadn wrote: post #53
epai wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to this infographic (linked below), it seems like Apple Music does give more average revenue per play than Spotify, $0.0060 for vs $0.0044. But in general, Apple Music isn’t _that_ much better than the rest where paying artists goes. It lags far below tidal, for example, which doles out $0.0125 per play on average. https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/spotify-ap...

Holy cow. So you have to play a song 227 times for the artist to make a dollar off the song? Any idea what it's like for just buying the song on Amazon?

Artists or record labels get about 30 cents of a $0.99 song purchase I believe.

Re: Addressing Spotify’s Claims

#160

Post by hjk05 »

ahmedalsudani wrote: post #112
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.

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.
Post reply on HN