“U.S. government antitrust regulators are looking into claims about whether Apple’s treatment of rival streaming music apps is illegal under antitrust law, according to three industry sources,” Diane Bartz and Julia Love report for Reuters.
“Apple recently launched a new music streaming service, Apple Music. It also provides the App Store platform for competing streaming services including Jango, Spotify, Rhapsody and others,” Bartz and Love report. “Apple takes a 30 percent cut of all in-app purchases for digital goods, such as music streaming subscriptions and games, sold on its platform.”
Bartz and Love report, “While $9.99 has emerged as the going monthly rate for music subscriptions, including Apple’s, some streaming companies complain that Apple’s cut forces them to either charge more in the App Store than they do on other platforms or erode their profit margins.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Tough.
We’ve already been through this ad nauseam with magazine and newspaper publishers years ago: If you don’t like Apple’s App Store policies, don’t offer your apps through it.
Apple doesn’t have monopoly on smartphones or tablets – only on quality, paying smartphone and tablet users – and there’s nothing illegal about that whatsoever.
Sleep tight, Apple Music also-rans.