Spotify Says Apple One Bundle Will Cause 'Irreparable Harm to Developer Community'

[cyb3rdud3]

As a consumer, how is this bad for me to get a better deal when I consolidate my subscriptions? My car insurance company gives me a good deal on a multi car insurance deal as well.

Besides if Spotify actually focuses on keeping their catalogue better than Apple Music and start adding more features then perhaps they have not so much to worry about. Besides globally there are so many more devices that Spotify works on compared to the small market of Apple.

Big cry babies. They should focus on their own great opportunities.

 

[ComRadMac]

by bundling it Apple is leveraging itself to an unfair advantage.

Or, by bundling it Apple is leveraging itself to provide a better, cheaper service for consumers.

Bundling services doesn't equate to unfair advantage. Or it hasn't for the other 1000 companies that do this, anyway.

 

[WordsmithMR]

That is funny because until this past year I was only using Spotify because it was bundled with Hulu... but since I switched my carrier I get Apple Music free... and a discount with Hulu in the Disney+ bundle. Perhaps Spotify should work better deals like other companies do... not claim there is an apocalypse.

 

[CoronaOnTap]

It’s not consumer friendly. Apple Music used to cost me $10 a month which was already higher than I wanted to pay. Now Apple wants me to pay $15 a month just for Apple Music because I wouldn’t be using the other services.

Apple One may make sense for some but for me it’s trash.
This plus the lack of X-Cloud support.... ANDROID is looking better and better each day.

I never everrrrrrr thought about leaving Apple before and here we are.

So you’d voicing your disagreements on Android forums soon?

 

[Ethosik]

Why can't we have nice things? I currently have as monthly charges (for family subscriptions):

iCloud 2TB - $9.99
Apple Music - $14.99
Apple TV+ - $4.99
Apple News+ - $9.99
Apple Arcade - $4.99

Getting Apple One will save $15 a month for me. And includes the fitness subscription which I will also use.

 

[JBGoode]

It’s not consumer friendly. Apple Music used to cost me $10 a month which was already higher than I wanted to pay. Now Apple wants me to pay $15 a month just for Apple Music because I wouldn’t be using the other services.

Apple One may make sense for some but for me it’s trash.
This plus the lack of X-Cloud support.... ANDROID is looking better and better each day.

I never everrrrrrr thought about leaving Apple before and here we are.

Where does it say that you are being forced to subscribe to Apple One instead of just staying with Apple Music like you are now? Hint: Nowhere.

It's amazing that people are literally making things up to be angry about.

 

[mdriftmeyer]

There’s differences and similarities. That question is a bad argument to suggest it’s ok. Amazon needs to be broken up too.

Sorry, but then WalMart, AT&T [Warner, HBO, etc], Verizon, Comcast [NBC/Hulu/CNBC/MSNBC,etc], DISNEY [ABC/PIXAR/ILM/LUCASARTS/ESPN/etc], T-Mobile [US Sprint and more soon], all of them need to be broken up because I want to be nickel and dimed to death, but feel like I have a choice, when all these disparate companies seem to charge nearly identical prices, as separate service providers, in specific necessity areas of modern life, but over here Apple with the likes of Amazon attempting to consolidate several of these services, at a reduced cost to the consumer, should be barred from doing so.

These arguments wear thin on this site.

 

[OlliFlamme]

Those who look at the competition and envy it, actually show a desire to be (the same as) the competition.

By turning your focus towards the competition, you take away your focus from your own creative desire and your search for true inspiration.

When you start blaming the competition for making it impossible for you to make a fair chance, you probably have burnt up your creative desire long before that.

These lines only describe small and easy truths that apply to a human individual’s self esteem. Spotify is a huge player, and actually is in awe for the humongous Apple. I cannot relate, and neither can I respect such a low self esteem, and so will the near future prove that this self victimisation is plainly pathetic.

It’s getting smelly of an ‘All developers matter’ movement.

In the proper turn of events, Spotify would think by itself that quality goes above quantity... they could choose to define the latter, because there is so much one can criticise Apple for, that you plain and simple could plot a road map on how things can be done in a way cooler and better thought of way.

The biggest mistake Apple makes (in my opinion, duh!) is to smear things on its customer base that its core customer base never asked for...

 

[mdriftmeyer]

Why can't we have nice things? I currently have as monthly charges (for family subscriptions):

iCloud 2TB - $9.99
Apple Music - $14.99
Apple TV+ - $4.99
Apple News+ - $9.99
Apple Arcade - $4.99

Getting Apple One will save $15 a month for me. And includes the fitness subscription which I will also use.

Ditto for me.

 

[davidjschloss]

Sorry let me make sure that I get this right–Spotify, who has purchased numerous podcasting companies and has made their podcasts available only on Spotify, instead of being freely available, is worried that a subscription based service will cause harm to the community of developers?

 

[KALLT]

Spotify does appear hypocritical given that they themselves have no qualms about bundling Spotify with other services. Some years ago there were not only objections from an antitrust perspective, but also from a net neutrality standpoint, as Spotify was bundled with certain mobile data plans at no extra cost for the mobile data. It is especially glaring if you take into account that Spotify is still the market leader, with almost twice the (global) market share of Apple Music (the nearest competitor).

That said, AppleOne has one obvious disadvantage: if you contemplate to stop using one of the bundled services in favour of a third-party service, you might – or probably will – be paying more, because you cannot just swap out one particular service and will lose the bundle price if you switch back to à la carte. This bundle disincentives you to choose alternatives and results in lock-in. It becomes even more egregious for the premier bundle, because that bundle’s price is ridiculously low.

 

[Mr.Blacky]

Musicians have long argued that Spotify causes irreparable harm to their community.


Anyone can bundle apps and subscriptions on the App Store.

Then what's that crap all about?!

 

[mdriftmeyer]

Those who look at the competition and envy it, actually show a desire to be the same as the competition.

By turning your focus towards the conpetition, you take away yoir focus from your creative desire and the search of true inspiration.

When you start blaming the competition for making it impossible for you to make a fair chance, you probably have burnt up your creative desire ling before that.

These lines only describe small and easy truths that apply to a human individual’s self esteem. Spotify is a huge player, and actually is in awe for the humongous Apple. I cannot relate, and neither can I respect such a low self esteem, and so will the near future prove that this self victimisation is plain pathetic.

It’s getting smelly of an ‘All developers matter’ movement.

In the proper turn of events, Spotify will think by itself that quality goes above quantity... they could choose to define the latter, because there is so much one can criticise Apple for, that you plain and simple could plot a road map on how things can be done in a way cooler and better thought of way. The biggest mistake Apple makes is to smear things on its customer base that its core customer base never asked for...

You lost me on the last paragraph. That paragraph is an opportunity to show something superior not proclaim it as some actual fact in the present. You speak for yourself and no one else. You aren't the core customer base. You are one of over one billion customers.

 

[vmistery]

I don’t actually even understand Spotify’s view on this one. Apple are not preventing you from making your own News / TV / Games / cloud storage platform here and bundling them up. The only thing they’d struggle to do is the fitness integration with the watch and frankly I suspect very very few people will use that in Apple’s version anyway. The only real difference is Spotify was first to succeed in music streaming but they ain’t even trying in these other markets .

 

[davidjschloss]

Ditto for me.

But think about how that will hurt the developer community. By saving $15 for what you’re already getting, you’ll. No wait. Um. Yeah, no harm here that’s not already done.

 

[dtrj787]

Seriously?! It's an option. You aren't forced to subscribed to it. Maybe you use make your own devices then, so they can flop.

 

[davidjschloss]

I don’t actually even understand Spotify’s view on this one. Apple are not preventing you from making your own News / TV / Games / cloud storage platform here and bundling them up. The only thing they’d struggle to do is the fitness integration with the watch and frankly I suspect very very few people will use that in Apple’s version anyway. The only real difference is Spotify was first to succeed in music streaming but they ain’t even trying in these other markets .

And also Spotidy is trying to turn podcasts from freely available to subscription-based by buying up podcast companies and making their shows available only to subscribers.

 

[ActionableMango]

They offer a great music service but its all they offer.

I gave up on Spotify after they inserted suggested songs into most of my Playlists. I spent a lot of time in a crappy mobile interface making those playlists, and Spotify ruined them.

In an attempt to salvage things I took the time to remove all the songs they'd added. I had foolishly assumed this was some sort of 1-time thing. Shortly after that, they reinserted a bunch of songs into my playlists again. This is absolutely customer hostile. Screw Spotify.

 

[kc9hzn]

Some startups pretend to use ads/subscriptions as a monetization strategy when their real monetization strategy is get VC investment + get a bunch of users + acquisition. Sometimes this works (WhatsApp, Instagram, any other service Facebook buys), sometimes it fails and the company has to scramble to make ads/subscriptions a viable monetization scheme when it wasn’t ever meant to be one. Twitter is a great example of a startup/product whose monetization scheme was probably acquisition that had to cram ads everywhere when they failed to get acquired. Facebook is an example of a company with a similar strategy that succeeded despite the lack of acquisition, Facebook succeeds where Twitter largely fails by hoovering up as much data about you as possible. Where does Spotify fit into this? They’re a startup that clearly had acquisition as its real monetization scheme (the free tier was too good and clearly was intended just to get market share) that failed to be acquired (Amazon, Google, Apple instead saw fit to start their own services or, in the case of Apple, buy Beats for less than Spotify and get audio engineers that could help with the development of the HomePod and AirPods). As a result, Spotify has had to scramble to get subscriptions actually working as a monetization scheme. But Spotify has a real issue with getting free subscribers to pony up to paid service (they likely made the original free service too good relative to the paid service).

 

[Realityck]

Let me get this straight. Apple is to invest billions into the platform, but barred from vertically integrating services with it. Only the free loading 3rd party developers/OEMs should be allowed?
Grow up.

Remember with Apple services content they are receive full revenue through their Apple store and services. Anyone else that has a recurring subscription for a service using the Apple App Store is at 30% less revenue first year then 15% second year if I am not mistaken.
Proactively this would be a wonderful time for Apple to reconsider their current subscription rules via App store if it should permanently drop it to 15% given the current marketplace mood.

 

[Darth.Titan]

iPhone dominates the smartphone market? What about the 85% of smartphone users (over three billion people) who do not use an Apple device?

Where would you draw the line in terms of marketshare when Apple could do what they do now?

It’s about 15% now.

10%?

5%?

And that's the point everyone seems to forget while using words like "stranglehold" and "monopoly". iOS represents a small minority of overall smartphone marketshare, and yet everyone acts like if they don't play by Apple's rules they'll go out of business. The vast majority of smartphone users are still out there on Android, and still fair game.

The problem as I see it is that the Apple ecosystem seems to generate more money than the majority Android market. I won't speculate as to why, but apparently Apple's measly 15% of the smartphone market generates more paying users than the 85% Android segment.

Spotify's complaints about these bundles were worded poorly, as several contributors to this thread have managed to more clearly and succinctly state Spotify's concerns. In my opinion Spotify's complaints are not without merit, but I don't believe it's as dire a situation as they're making it out to be. Especially with Apple's small percentage of marketshare.

 

[dtrj787]

Amazon Music is hardly a huge player in the music field. Apple Music is #2 and by bundling it Apple is leveraging itself to an unfair advantage.

But bundling it with TV+, arcade and storage isn't going to pull people away. TV+ doesn't have that much content. Arcade only hits a certain demographic and most don't use storage. All 3 of these don't come anywhere close to unlimited 1 or 2 day shipping.

 

[OlliFlamme]

Excuse me for that short circuit you just experienced. Like anybody else here, I talk for myself. Don’t pretend you are any different.

The principle I very quickly rambled upon is actually based upon Steve Job’s own words. Perhaps you weren’t born then, but I date from powermac G3’s as first products.

What you cannot see is not fiction per se: the vision that lies behind Apple today, compared to the vision that used to be the main drive... could as well be still within other people outside of Apple.

N.B. I didn’t hope for you to hang on to even my first words. You might find easier trains of thought to jump on

 

[ScreenSavers]

Wait a minute… It’s unfair that Apple Music comes pre-installed on an iPhone? Well maybe we should just buy Spotify phones then… Wait they don’t exist.

If Apple manufactures the device, they can choose to put their software on it.

 

[gaximus]

That's sort of the problem with anti-competitive behavior. Someone else asked how is this different from Amazon Prime--it's a little different, but that's a fair question, too. We're talking about companies that are valued at over $2,000,000,000,000 (that's trillion) dominating markets. Microsoft was once sued (and lost when it was only a software company--though a very dominant one) for bundling Internet Explorer on Windows. So, I get that a lot of people on here are calling out whiners and complainers, but this behavior is pretty monopolistic.

They were sued for bundling Internet Explorer on Windows, the were sued because it was baked into the OS, you couldn't use the OS without it. You had zero choice. Apple is just offering a music service to the customer at a discounted price(if you look at the bundle in that way). You can choose not to use it or get the bundle at all. you can choose to use Spotify, and it works as if integrated into the OS. Media controls, lock screen display, etc.