On Thursday, the European Union approved Apple’s plans to procure Shazam, the British music discovery app, only after an EU antitrust investigation showed that this action would not be an inconvenience to competition in the bloc.
This deal was announced in December 2017 to assist the iPhone in better competition with Spotify, the industry leader in music streaming services.
A full-scale investigation was started by the European Commission this April over doubts about whether companies may buy a data-rich rival to mine it for information or drive others out of the market after observing the probe requested by seven European countries, including France, Italy, Spain, and Sweden.
According to a Reuters report last month, Apple was in a position to win unconditional EU antitrust approval for the deal following.
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. 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. – Margrethe Vestager, EU competition commissioner
Shazam identifies songs when a smartphone is pointed at an audio source.
