> The issue of the 30% cut alone is enough for further investigation,
Not really, it's 30% for everyone, not just Spotify.
Not really, it's 30% for everyone, not just Spotify.
As they mention on the website. That's not true. It's not 30% for Uber or Deliveroo. And most importantly, it's not 30% for Apple Music.
Regarding Apple Music I'm not sure what that supposed to mean. I'm pretty sure that Spotify doesn't charge the same for "Spotify Premium" and "McDonalds" ads.
What do you mean it isn't? Apple Store could trivially take a 30% cut of the Apple Music revenue, and the only thing that would change would be the distribution of revenue between Apple Music and Apple Store in Apple's revenue reports. The total revenue would be the same.
This effectively gives Apple an extra 30% margin for their streaming music service.
I definitely couldn’t start a ride sharing company when Uber and Lyft are being funded by VCs...
If you buy a real world product or service, you need to use a third party payment service like Stripe (or Apple Pay, if you want), there is a 0% commission fee from Apple. This is why Amazon can distribute an app on iOS that allows to buy whatever you want without Apple getting a cut; well, anything but digital goods, like Kindle books, which in fact can't be bought from Amazon iOS app.
Apple could charge themselves the 30% App Store fee for Apple Music, demonstrating that the App Store is a fair marketplace that doesn't artificially advantage Apple's own services. It would then be incumbent on Apple to prove that Apple Music is priced fairly, rather than being deliberately operated at a loss to squeeze other streaming music services out of the market.
It's somewhat similar to net neutrality proposals. AT&T doesn't have a monopoly as an ISP. However, if AT&T starts/acquires a video streaming service, they should not give unfair advantages to their own service because they want to compete with Netflix.
What does it change ? Nothing.
It’s on multiple platforms, it’s tied to Beats, it has a relationship with iTunes Store, there is advertising involved etc. So there could be multiple licensing and revenue sharing deals that mean Apple Music is not running at a loss.
In fact I think it’s likely than you’re wrong.
Interesting, so Spotify could pay nearly the same simply by paying the 30% to artists instead of Apple.
And of course, those 37 might already be partly paid by Spotify anyway.