The applications of music recognition They are very useful to discover the name of those songs that sound familiar to us but that we do not know. That is why large companies want to integrate their well developed services into their operating systems. It is the case of Shazam and Apple.
In December 2017, Apple disbursed 400 million for the purchase of Shazam, but the European Commission decided to investigate in 7 countries the influence of this purchase for the most direct competitors of the Big Apple and other streaming music services. Finally, the CE approves purchase of Shazam and concludes that the interaction with the competition will be practically nil.
Apple's purchase of Shazam passes the speed bump of the European Commission
The person in charge of verifying the viability of Apple's purchase of Shazam against competitors was the Competition Curator, Margrethe Vestager. She and her team worked to analyze the viability of the purchase, the influence that it would have against Apple Music's most direct competitors: Spotify and other streaming music services.
Currently, Shazam integrates with Siri to find the song that is playing but the true intentions are unknown by the big apple with this platform. What we do know is that the European Commission has positively valued the purchase and, therefore, it has been accepted in all the countries of the same. During the investigation it was assessed whether would influence the customers of the service in order to change platforms.
Data is essential elements in the digital economy, which is why we must carefully examine the operations that lead to the purchase of data packages.
Ultimately, Competition analyzed whether Apple would access commercial data in a sensitive way about customers or competitors so that they could modify the way in which users decide which applications and services to use. The possible relationship-competition between Apple Music, Shazam and Spotify, among others, was investigated.