So it looks like an official FTC antitrust review of Apple Music is coming

[Rogifan]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blog...cs-antitrust-review-of-apples-music-business/

My guess is Apple is already working on changes to the 30% cut for subscriptions. But this article claims Apple doesn't allow subscription services to offer discounted family plans. How is that possible? How would Apple even have a say in that? The most they could do (and I think already do) is say you can't charge less outside of your app than you do in-app. I could see this getting really ugly, especially knowing rival services are heavily lobbying congress to investigate.

 

[BigInDallas]

If they are innocent. They have nothing to worry about. Guilty ? Get out the check book

 

[Rogifan]

If they are innocent. They have nothing to worry about. Guilty ? Get out the check book

Spotify and Rdio don't have to use IAP. Barnes & Noble and Amazon don't. It's not difficult for someone to go to spotify.com and sign up for a subscription.

 

[whsbuss]

Gov't always sticking their nose in again. Just because companies lobby doesn't make someone guilty. Apple should just remove the competitors from the app store. That solves the 30% apple tax.

 

[flur]

Gov't always sticking their nose in again. Just because companies lobby doesn't make someone guilty. Apple should just remove the competitors from the app store. That solves the 30% apple tax.

Yeah, that'd go over well with customers. Lol.

 

[Michael CM1]

It's called competitors bitching because they want all the money. That App Store is a huge infrastructure and so Apple has to take a cut to pay its bills. As far as I know Apple doesn't play favorites in the store, either, charging that 30 percent rate for almost everything. Walling off that garden is a boost to security, and so Apple wants its cut for the people it hires to review apps and develop the secure procedures, applications, software, etc.

This really isn't any different than credit card companies charging for use of their platform. Really it's basically Square on a much larger scale. If you want to pay/subscribe in a way that exists outside of Square and the credit card companies (i.e. cash), then Square will keep track of your transactions but not charge you any fee. If you use Square to process payment through a credit card, Square charges about 3 percent.

I just don't see how this violates any of the laws mentioned. Maybe there could be trouble with the family plan deal, which I'm guessing Apple would possibly agree to fix pretty quickly. But overall it seems like competitor bitching because Apple Music is about to eat up a ton of the profits in the music streaming industry. It may not reach the number of paid subscribers Spotify has soon, but it'll get big enough to hurt Spotify badly.

 

[johngordon]

Someone else posted in a different thread why this is nonsense in the simplest of terms.

Its like asking a retailer to sell products at the wholesale price.