Bring on the Music, Apple: Spotify ups the ante - and money pot

Re: Interesting...

Well at the moment, you can install the Spotify/Amazon Music/Google Play Music App on your iDevice so you can have different music services, but will that continue once Apple Music is launched?

Re: Interesting...

"Using their large user base to move into a new market!, surely that is anti competitive and there should be a option to install a different music service instead, a bit like Microsoft where made to do with Explorer."

No, it's not anti-competitive. Apple aren't as popular as their presence in the tech press suggests, and have nowhere near the level of clout MS enjoyed in the late '90s.

In MS's case, they had 95% market share of the whole world's desktop OS market and were leveraging that for dominance in web browsing. In Apple's case, they have about 15% of the world's smartmobe market, so no matter how they leverage it they're not gonna shut out competitors. For all the giant valuation of Apple, they've never actually been dominant in any market; even in the US, where iPhones are more popular than elsewhere, Samsung and Android have pretty much always had better market share - and North America is actually a really small market (~400m people, half the size of Europe, a third the size of India and 1/4th the size of China). In global terms, it's like being the premier cheese-monger in Dudley.

If you look at the rest of their tech portfolio, it actually gets worse. Macbooks and Mac Desktops have a market share of about 10%; that's only about 3% higher than it was back in the mid-90s. Even the mighty iPod, which had over 70% of the US MP3 market every year for most of a decade, was actually below 50% if you looked at it world wide. The Watch's iPhone dependency means it's locked out of over 85% of the worldwide market automatically, which doesn't exactly bode well. iPad market share fell off a cliff the moment serious competitors decided the tablet market was a thing after all, and continues to plummet even in a now shrinking market.

Re: It should be noted...

It should also be noted that Universal Music Group, a major partner under investigation, has already repudiated said claims.

Re: It should be noted...

That Apple Music and record labels are being investigated for evidence of price fixing or collusion to shut out freemium streaming services like Spotify. It's being led by the same two Attorney Generals who went after, found, and prosecuted Apple and publishers for price fixing in the eBook sphere.

It should also be noted that "encouraging" investigations of organisations moving into an established market and then ensuring that this is widely reported is not exactly a new tactic for those already in that market, which is what may be happening here.

I don't think Apple would burn its fingers twice - it doesn't have to. This is not to say that Apple would or would not act if it thought it could get away with it (no idea what stance current leadership takes in that aspect), just that risk vs reward doesn't stack up for it to do so.

You should try it (Spotify that is)

There is a lot of good new music out there if you look. Not having to pay for a CD or suffering the (usually dire) playlists of radio stations makes trying out new stuff risk free and rewarding.

I used to think the same as if it's not in my library then I wont be listening to it and I always carried a 160gb ipod classic. But now I mainly use the free Google Play Music, only lets you upload 20,000 songs so I had to be selective but does give me access on any device anywhere at no cost. Also means I don't need to carry the ipod as it was on the heavy side was happy to drop it.

Now use a mix of locally stored and cloud stored depending on what connection I'm on and how much data I have left to burn on my mobe.

Also useful when visiting parents to download your library to another machine but of course I wouldn't use it for those purposes.