On September 15th, Spotify openly criticized Apple’s new digital subscription bundling offer they had brought out, as anti-competitive. Apple has come out with the new Apple One watch and offers it in a bundle. The bundle includes a collection of Apple services, such as Apple Music, 50GB Apple Storage, Apple TV and Apple Arcade. It only costs $14,95 a month and is about $6 cheaper than buying them individually. Apple also has different versions of this bundle. The Family one, costing $19,95 and has 200GB storage instead of 50GB and the Premier one for $29,95, which not only has 2TB storage but also the news service and the upcoming fitness service.
Apple has always been busy on making their customers buy deeper into their services, while making these services or bundles not accessible by third-party companies.
As mentioned before Spotify did not like the introduction of the Apple One bundle, stating:
Once again, Apple is using its dominant position and unfair practices to disadvantage competitors and deprive consumers by favoring its own services,” a Spotify spokesperson said in a statement to CNN Business.
“We call on competition authorities to act urgently to restrict Apple’s anti-competitive behavior, which if left unchecked, will cause irreparable harm to the developer community and threaten our collective freedoms to listen, learn, create, and connect.”
It is not the first time Spotify called regulators on Apple. Last year, Spotify also filled a complaint against Apple with European Antitrust Officials for giving its own music services an unfair advantage over competitors, thus again for being anti-competitive.
Apple is also being sued by Epic games, which is the maker of the very popular game called Fortnite. Apple removed Fortnite from their Apple store, stating Fortnite did not comply with the policies&rules. Again Apple is to powerful, considering Apple store and Google play store being monopolists in offering mobile games.
To come back to the bundle…. In my opinion, the bundle is anti-competitive. The bundle offers all the mentioned Apple services for a relatively cheap price of $14,95 a month. Considering both Apple Music and Spotify have their normal prices at $9,99 a month, consumers will get all these other services for only $5 dollars extra. Other companies can not compete with this bundle and price.
Apart from this bundle being ant-competitive, is Apple becoming ‘to’ powerful….?
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/19/tech/apple-one-spotify-antitrust/index.html
https://edition.cnn.com/business/live-news/apple-event-september-15/h_ddc2de85a6964f8f0e114f97583355be
https://www.apple.com/nl/apple-one/
Bundling sounds like a natural step knowing the wide range of products they are offering. It would be similar to Amazon Prime offering movies, shipping discounts, Audible and more as a bundle. The main issue is that Apple is known to limit their products’ compatibility with the third party products, while Amazon is creating an ecosystem. By all means, Amazon is also being sued for using its power to push their own products, but to a much lesser extent. With EU investigation possibly taking years, we might get the answer too late to affect the habits of the users. That might have been Apple’s strategy all along – to make Apple users accustomed to all Apple apps before the lawsuits reach the verdict.
Amazon: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_19_4291, https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/27/21156844/amazon-unions-petition-ftc-letter-anticompetitive-antitrust-investigation
Apple: https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/16/21292651/apple-eu-antitrust-investigation-app-store-apple-pay
Thanks for your comment Agne! I agree and I think you are right about the fact that Apple’s strategy have been to make users accustomed to all Apple apps, in order to create a platform with high switching costs, just before the lawsuits would come in. These take years, while everyone is still using Apple more and more.