The girls are fighting: Breaking down Spotify’s complaints about Apple
Spotify accuses Apple of being anticompetitive in favor of its Apple Music streaming service
Spotify has been on a crusade against Apple, which continued on Friday with renewed complaints about the tech giant’s “anticompetitive” behavior. “Apple’s anticompetitive practices harm competitors and result in higher prices, lower product quality, and less choice,” the music streaming service posted to social media. “In tech, a good user experience is everything. But Apple intentionally forces competitors like Spotify to degrade the consumer experience while giving their own apps (like Apple Music) the freedom to do what they want, without having to pay fees. This is anticompetitive behavior and it’s illegal.”
This is a drum Spotify has been banging for a while now; the company even has a whole website, “Time to Play Fair,” dedicated to laying out its complaints against Apple, which includes the fact that certain apps pay a 30% fee for use of their in-app purchase system. This, among other complaints, gives Apple Music an unfair advantage in the marketplace, because Apple obviously isn’t charging its own service for these features.
The dispute came to a head in March when the European Commission passed The Digital Markets Act, which “establishes a set of clearly defined objective criteria to qualify a large online platform as a ‘gatekeeper’ and ensures that they behave in a fair way online and leave room for contestability.” The European Commission fined Apple over €1.8 billion “for abusing its dominant position on the market for the distribution of music streaming apps.”
Apple offered up some changes to comply with the DMA, but Spotify—which reportedly has more than 56% of the EU streaming market to Apple Music’s 11%, per Forbes—called the new plan “a complete and total farce.” In response, Apple released a statement saying, “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 have helped them build, update, and share their app with Apple users in 160 countries spanning the globe. Fundamentally, their complaint is about trying to get limitless access to all of Apple’s tools without paying anything for the value Apple provides.”
This all may seem a little ridiculous, given Spotify’s apparent stranglehold on the music streaming market and its documented issues with paying artists pennies per stream. But Apple is also, obviously, a big evil corporation with a growing monopoly over tech and entertainment. The question is, does the fighting between two big fat cats actually benefit the everyday average user? Spotify would argue yes, because Apple’s restrictions hinder the user experience, and because competition, as the thought goes, is better for the consumer. Certainly, it can’t hurt to let two tech titans take each other down a few pegs, right?