AppleInsider Staff
Speaking at the D10 conference on Wednesday, Parker claims that there was a sense that Apple felt threatened by Spotify and may have taken steps to stop its launch in the U.S. where iTunes is the dominating music distribution entity.
“There was some indication that that might have been happening,†Parker said. “You hear things, people send you emails.â€
Although onstage at the time, Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek didn't comment on why it took the service two and a half years after it launched in Europe to reach America. The app-based music streamer, created in 2006 in Sweden, was already gaining critical acclaim in a number of countries by 2010, but only hit U.S. shores in July 2011.
Parker admits that the music industry is not an overly important sector for Apple and it is unlikely that the company is too concerned with rivals like Spotify, saying "“[Music] is still such a small part of their overall business, it wouldn’t be hugely significant to their bottom line.â€
Spotify Director Sean Parker at D10. | Source: All Things D
Before Parker's comments, Ek said that there are about 10 million Spotify users in the U.S., 3 million of which are paying customers. The service's catalog now boasts 18 million songs and the list is growing by 10,000 or 20,000 tracks per day.
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56 Comments
If this is true it is quite sad...
Given the strength of Apple's presence in so many areas of modern technology, their constant/relentless attempts to block the efforts of anything that even appears to be competition does little more than indicate that they're not quite as confident in their wares as some might believe. Healthy competition's is always a good thing, and when companies go out of their way to thwart it that the entire industry becomes stifiled and far less innovative than it ever should be.
Spotify is going to fail. Label after label are pulling their music from the service.
If this is true it is quite sad...
No proof, no evidence, just suspicions and rumors. No need to be sad unless, of course, you are predisposed to think the worst of Apple. Are you?
Great way to drum up some last minute publicity for your "iTunes-killer" (take a number, Lol) music service, Sean.
Go to D10, and since you've got nothing else going for your service that never really took off in the way you dreamed, make up some stuff about "big bad Apple", and then dodge any requests for proof by alluding to your own "insider" knowledge: "You hear things, people send you emails."
And *then*, backpedal just enough, and then make just enough conciliatory remarks that you *might* come off as "balanced":
"Parker admits that the music industry is not an overly important sector for Apple and it is unlikely that the company is too concerned with rivals like Spotify, saying "?[Music] is still such a small part of their overall business, it wouldn?t be hugely significant to their bottom line."
So Apple went out of their way to block a service that would have competed against Apple in a segment Apple no longer really cared about.
Uh-huh.