2024-02-23 00:23:50
The beginning of this week was marked by the news that the European Commission is expected to issue its first antitrust fine against Apple for allegedly violating laws that favor competition with App Store fees — focusing on the music streaming market. The fine should be around €500 million.
However, instead of trying to fight the fine (before it materializes), Apple decided to denounce the company behind the European body’s antitrust investigation: the Spotify.
In a statement released today, obtained by TechCrunchApple argued against the idea that Spotify was harmed by any anti-competitive practices on its part:
We’re happy to support the success of all developers — including Spotify, which is the largest music streaming app in the world. Spotify pays Apple nothing for the services that helped it build, update and share its app with Apple users in 160 countries around the world. Fundamentally, their complaint is about trying to get unlimited access to all of Apple’s tools without paying anything for the value Apple offers.
The Cupertino giant also highlighted that Spotify has a market share of 56% — much higher than Amazon Music’s 20% and Apple Music’s 11%. More than that, Maçã said that the Spotify application was downloaded (not just for the first time) or updated more than 119 billion times on your devices.
Other details about Spotify’s business disclosed by Apple include the fact that the streaming giant uses thousands of Apple APIs in 60 frameworksas well as Apple’s beta testing platform, the TestFlight.
Furthermore, Maçã revealed that Spotify has already sent more than 420 versions from its app to the App Store review and even that Apple engineers helped the company resolve various issues, such as those affecting hardware-accelerated media playback and battery optimization.
Spotify aims to profit from regulations?
As stated, the European Union’s investigation into the music streaming market and App Store policies was initially triggered by Spotify — which not only complained several times about Apple’s guidelines, but also met, over the last 10 years at least 65 times with the European Commission in an attempt to convince the body that Apple’s rules have a negative impact on music streaming services, according to the reports.
However, Apple said that although Spotify had claimed that Apple’s policies were harming competition, the music streaming market was, in reality, on the rise.
In this sense, the company claims that Spotify wants to “rewrite the rules for its own gain”. Apple doesn’t believe Spotify’s complaints are about competition or finding a better deal for consumers — it says Spotify simply “wants a better deal” and is “using the European Commission to try to get it.”
We’ll see how (or even if) Spotify will respond to Apple’s most recent move — and whether this will have any impact on the bureaucratic part involving the EU.
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