Apple Can’t Beat Spotify

There are lots of reasons to be down on Apple nowadays. Its tentative steps into artificial intelligence have not gone well, leading to a high-profile executive shake-up today. Sales of its core product, the iPhone, are stagnant. The most recent attempt at a new product, the Vision Pro mixed reality headset, flopped. And as our Wayne Ma reported today, most of its subscription businesses—including Apple TV+, Apple Music and Fitness+—are also-rans in their markets.

If there’s a silver lining to this cloud, it’s that antitrust regulators may have a harder time proving Apple’s market power than we realize. Clearly Apple has not succeeded in extending its dominance in smartphones to other markets. That’s most obviously true in music streaming, where it has used every weapon in its arsenal to become a powerhouse. It’s hard to open the built-in Music app on your iPhone without getting a promotional offer to sign up for Apple Music. And thanks to how Apple runs the App Store, signing up for Apple Music is much easier than subscribing to its main rival, Spotify. To avoid paying Apple a cut of its subscription revenue, Spotify in the U.S. requires people to sign up for its service on their computers rather than their phones. (Tougher European rules on app stores have allowed Spotify to offer sign-ups within its app.)