The Pop Corporation

Once again, we’re talking about the lousy algorithm. For fear of sounding like horrible old-heads who yearn for the past, we do miss the time when we had every opportunity of listening to the music we wanted to, because we were the people off down the shops and trying before we were buying, and then buying stuff on our preferred format.

With James Blake hitting out against streaming as a thing recently, Spotify laying off staff, now we’re looking at Apple who have been ripping their users off. They have been fined £1.5 BILLION (!!!!!) by the EU after they completed an investigation which found that the tech bros had been not letting customers know there were cheaper options to access music, such as Spotify.

Spotify had complained about this before, saying that Apple were overcharging companies to appear on the Apple Store, thereby making their products more expensive than Apple’s, who presumably, weren’t charging themselves to appear on their own store. The EU look on such things pretty dimly, and the fine they served up was over four times more than predicted. The European Commission wants to make an example of tech giants who are seen to be abusing their power, clearly.

That said, commissioner Margrethe Vestager said they had their reasons, noting that a typical fine would amount to little more than a parking fine for such a wealthy firm, and this €1.8bn is not only justified, but also a deterrent to anyone else thinking of playing sillybuggers.

She said: “I think it is important to see that if you are a company who is dominant and you do something illegal, it will be punished. We want to show our resolve that we will go into these cases.”

Anti-competition is no joke, and Apple must been reeling from this, given their disproportionate share Stateside, where they have something of a monopoly. She continued: “Apple’s rules ended up harming consumers. Critical information was withheld so that consumers could not effectively use or make informed choices. Some consumers may have paid more because they weren’t aware that they can pay less if they subscribed outside of the app.”

This overcharging Apple customers has been going on for the best part of a decade now. She continued: “Music streaming developers were not allowed to inform the users inside their own apps of cheaper prices for the same subscription on the internet. They were also not allowed to change links in their apps to the consumers to their websites and pay lower prices there.”