56% market share-haver needs protection from the 4th largest competitor

I doubt anybody have missed that EU today fined Apple 1.8 billion EUR after Spotify complained they have to pay money to Apple for being on the App Store.

Yes, I find it ridiculous. Spotify is an enormous company, they have 56% of the streaming music market in the EU and Apple comes at forth place behind also Amazon Music and YouTube Music. But Apple is being anticompetitive? Not very successfully so in that case.

I urge everybody to turn their cynicism level down and then read Apple’s statement “The App Store, Spotify, and Europe’s thriving digital music market”. You don’t have to agree with every point. But really read it. Try to see it from their perspective. Maybe you’ll come out less on the side of Spotify/EU than you thought.

I’ll quote my favorite part, but again I recommend reading in full for context.

Over the next eight years, and more than 65 meetings with Spotify, the European Commission has tried to build three different cases. With every pivot, they’ve narrowed the scope of their claims — but each theory has had a couple of features in common: No evidence of consumer harm: European consumers have more choices than ever in a digital music market that’s grown exponentially. In just eight years, it’s gone from 25 million subscribers to almost 160 million — with more than 300 million active listeners — and Spotify has been the biggest winner. No evidence of anti-competitive behavior: Eight years of investigations have never yielded a viable theory explaining how Apple has thwarted competition in a market that is so clearly thriving. The European Commission is issuing this decision just before their new regulation — the Digital Markets Act (DMA) — comes into force. Apple is set to comply with the DMA in days, and our plans include changes to the rules challenged here. What’s clear is that this decision is not grounded in existing competition law. It’s an effort by the Commission to enforce the DMA before the DMA becomes law. The reality is that European consumers have more choices than ever. Ironically, in the name of competition, today’s decision just cements the dominant position of a successful European company that is the digital music market’s runaway leader.

I’ll take the opportunity to remind everyone that Spotify ain’t the good guys for even more reasons:

• they pay Joe Rogan 250 million per year
• They fired thousands while doing that
• They pay the least to artists of all streaming services