The European Union have shown a green signal to Apple in the ongoing case of Shazam buyout. Apple, in the month of December, last year showed its keen interest in buying Shazam for $400M. The iPhone maker’s motive behind this deal was to give a competition to Spotify music app.
The European Union started investigating the case in the month of April this year. EU had concerns regarding this case that Apple will misuse the data of the app in driving the existing competition from the industry. Well, turns out Apple has surpassed all the apprehensions and got the music discovery app.
EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager said, “After thoroughly analyzing Shazam’s user and music data, we found that their acquisition by Apple would not reduce competition in the digital music streaming market“. She even strengthened her statement with,” Data is key in the digital economy. We must therefore carefully review transactions which lead to the acquisition of important sets of data, including potentially commercially sensitive ones“.
A few days ago, we reported that Apple is set to win EU’s permission of Shazam buyout. It finally happened today. Let’s see how Apple will use this music discovery app in future and how it will affect the Spotify’s position in the market.