Why Spotify is such a clumsy – and necessary – critic of Apple's power.

Senator Elizabeth Warren can welcome an unlikely new passenger on her anti-monopoly vessel: Spotify. The music streaming service announced that it had filed a lawsuit against Apple with the European Commission on Wednesday, claiming that the App Store offered Apple an unfair advantage over its competitors – in which case it You need a 30% discount on any Spotify subscription. users pay via Apple. Apple Music is one of Spotify's main competitors, who does not have to pay such a toll to the company that owns it. But Spotify depends on the Apple App Store, since millions of users access the Spotify application on iPhones. Apple's charge for in-app purchases, according to Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, "would force us to artificially inflate the price of our premium subscription well above the price of Apple Music. And to keep our prices competitive for our customers, we can not do anything. To shed light on the problem, the Swedish company has launched an advocacy website, timingoplayfair.com, where concerned Spotify users can learn more about the traps of the streaming giant. .

Beyond the fees, Spotify also claims that, in some cases, Apple has limited the way Spotify can share promotions, for example by banning Spotify from sending emails to customers who use Apple. If Spotify's claims lead to an investigation that concludes that Apple effectively controls its platform in a way that stifles competition, the company could be fined and forced to end any anti-competitive practices. This sounds a bit like what happened with Google Android last year, when European Union regulators imposed a record $ 5 billion fine on the company for breaking the law. its antitrust rules, including requiring Android device manufacturers to preinstall Chrome and Google. applications, putting other search engines at an unfair disadvantage. Apple could be seen as putting its competitors at a disadvantage by forcing them to enter Apple's payment system and then charging high fees on transactions.

All that Spotify supports here is just – that is problem, the world's largest technology companies are also able to operate services on their own platforms. But it's also quite rich. Just days before filing a complaint with the European Commission, Spotify published an article explaining why it was appealing the decision of the US Royalty Copyright Board to raise the rates that music streaming services must pay to songwriters and songwriters. music publishers. Google, Amazon and Pandora are also attractive. Apple does not, but if others win, Apple will benefit from lower rates.

Currently, Spotify pays between $ 0.004 and $ 0.0084 per coin to any music rights holder of a song, which is typically a mix of record companies, artists, songwriters, and producers. . These penny fractions will not really pay any bills unless you put hundreds of thousands of times a month in the nets. By the end of January, the Federal Copyright Board had decided that, over a five-year period, royalty rates for artists and publishers would increase from 10.5% to 15.1% of revenues generated by creative work. Spotify indicates that the reason for the rate increase is wrong and will complicate the bundled service offer, such as the package announced earlier this week, which offers a free Hulu subscription to Spotify Premium members. Spotify explained in his message that, while understanding that everyone would like a bigger piece of the pie, "this can not be done at the expense of the continuous growth of the industry via streaming."

Although not all professional performers offer songs on Spotify, the vast majority of them do so, reasoning, as does Spotify with the App Store, about the fact that the popular platform is where the audience is. And they do so despite often derisory incomes. This can come from a tiny royalty on music and artist contracts with their record companies (as recent cases from hip hop group De La Soul and Tommy Boy Records show). Perhaps there should be a criticism like Spotify, another platform that would serve as an unfair guardian, to highlight the injustice in Apple's access control. These are the companies that depend on Apple and are big enough to compete with it and are best placed to criticize it, because they have a lot to lose if it abuses its power. But for now, Spotify's position is that it wants to prevent subscriptions from paying more money, while banning artists. It's unfortunate that this nascent critic of Apple's power did not spend much time looking at his.