What you are saying is your own conjecture but it's not necessarily the case.
Applies
equally well to everything you've said. Or do you secretly own and run Google and Spotify?
There are examples where an app store can exist along side with 3rd party payments, and the app store is not going away like you are suggesting. For example the Google play store.
Google's business is
not hardware and operating systems, like Apple's is. Google's business is getting as many people as possible to look at ads provided by Google to customers demographically cataloged and served up by Google. Apple's customers are people who buy phones. Google's customers are advertisers. Apple and Google are coming to the "app store ownership" role from
very different sides with different needs and goals. Is this that hard to understand?
You think that 30% premium being passed to customer has no impact on subscriptions and the industry? Of course it does, Apple is being another fat pig taking a cut off the backs of artists and Spotify by passing the premium onto customers is making subscriptions 30% more expensive which in turn alienates a good amount subscribers and represents lost royalties for artists.
Show me all the news stories (I'm sure there must be plenty, since you keep putting all the blame on Apple) where Apple put a gun to Spotify's head and ordered them to: a) put an app in Apple's App Store, and b) offer subscriptions in the app. You're calling Apple a fat pig for DOING EXACTLY WHAT WAS STATED IN THE AGREEMENTS THAT SPOTIFY AGREED TO when
Spotify chose to put an app in the store - they knew exactly what they were getting into, and they dragged the artists along with them.
Spotify stood in front of a long-existing wall, looked at the wall, examined the wall, and then bashed their head repeatedly against the wall, and you're blaming... the wall? and not Spotify?
You say Apple is "taking a cut off the backs of artists" - but
it is Spotify who doesn't care about the artists - they're consistently on the
low end of the scale for streaming payments to artists -
Spotify wants to pay the artists as little as they possibly can. Spotify chose to put an app into Apple's App Store, knowing full well, ahead of time, what the percentages were. And they stupidly got themselves into a bad situation that was easy to foresee (you can't give something away and "make it up on volume"), and yet you keep blaming Apple for Spotify's mistakes.
Spotify could easily have subscription signups only on their website (where they keep all the money, minus what goes to the credit card companies) and advertise the bejeezus out of that, all over the web, on TV, in print media, with people standing on street corners waving signs, etc. - the
only place they can't advertise that is in the app itself,
per agreements they made when they signed up to develop an app for the App Store - this is completely reasonable: if you open a new restaurant, do you expect to be able to put up signs advertising your restaurant
inside other restaurants? No -
every business would take exception to that.
If you sold, say, cookies, you could go to a local store and give them signs saying, "mmm, these cookies sure are delicious, you should buy some", hoping they'd display them around the store - good for you, good for the store. How do you think the same store would respond if you gave them signs saying, "mmm, these cookies sure are delicious, you should
go across the street to some other store and buy some". Think any stores would put your signs up then? That's exactly what Spotify wanted to do with advertising their website subscriptions inside the app they put in Apple's App Store. It's not just unrealistic, it's rude. It's boorish behavior.
Here's a novel idea - Spotify's big problem is getting users in its "free tier" (which, if I understand correctly, is supported by audio advertisements interspersed with the songs), to convert over to the paid tiers, where Spotify will get actual real money from them. Spotify should advertise on its own service - advertise "visit our website spotify.com to subscribe to Spotify for $X per month and get Y and Z benefits" - right there in its own audio stream. As a bonus, since Spotify created and runs the Spotify service, they don't have to charge themselves to advertise on their own service (just the way Apple,
who created the entire iPhone & App Store ecosystem, doesn't have to charge themselves to have apps in their own App Store). And it isn't an advertisement
built into the app, so it ought to satisfy Apple's restrictions on in-app advertisements.
