Can't apple just buy Spotify?
Is spotify for sale? There are other things Apple has been wanted to buy. One of them was drop box. This is documented fact.
For some reason there is this assumption that just because a company has the money to buy soothing, and they want to buy that thing, that they will inevitably own it. Not all companies sell out.
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The yawning is all because Apple are entering a marketing with established players offering feature complete services. I pay £10 a month for as music as I could possibly want, and public playlists, apps and radio features give me new music too.
So if and when Apple announce this iRadio service, in order to attract someone like me, it needs to fight on multiple fronts:
- It needs to match all of the features of Spotify, Rdio and Pandora, while offering me something substantive over and above those services
- Offer it at a very competitive price
- It needs to be platform agnostic
The service needs to stand on it's own. The service has to be the cake, and iOS integration the icing on top of it. I can access and play my spotify content on practically any internet connected computer or smartphone, and with the aid of the Spotify apps (Which are well designed and functional), I can take it all offline for 30 days without having to reconnect. If iRadio doesn't do this and something significant over and above what i currently get, there is precisely no incentive for a big chunk of music lovers to switch.
You made it quite difficult to respond to your statement since you just added your own thoughts, in red, to my original quote. In short, a combination of ALL of that is what could make it compete. If you break down every little thing, on its own, sure, you can say "this or that service already has that". But if Apple gives us all of these points in one, elegantly built in product, then yes, I would say it can compete.
Also, I disagree with price point competition. Apple worked pretty hard, and they were pretty proud when they could offer the 3G (and onward) on contract for a much cheaper price. Apple phones, just like Android phones can be had for free, and go up from there, in most countries that allow contract subsidies.
You may not care about radio. That's fair. Plenty of people do enjoy radio. The fact that being able to stream radio is not a plus to YOU, doesn't mean nobody likes it. There are dedicated apps out there with millions of downloads that do just that.
But the biggest point, that I have repeated now three times...
we don't even know what this service is going to be, and yet we are complaining. Find out what it is, decide you are disappointed, and then whine. Right now, all we know is a tentative title. Literally. That's it.