And you've just succinctly stated in a nutshell why this is an antitrust violation.

Apple is leveraging its market position in other markets to force out competition in the music market. With Apple, there's no option to provide Spotify to iPhone users except through Apple's own store.

With retail it's different--the retailer still has to pay for the product up-front. They charge more for the branded products because they can. People have seen the branded product on TV, or online, or in a restaurant, etc. Often but not always the branded products will be higher quality (but this depends on the product and the store), and so this is another differentiator between the store brand.

More importantly, and the reason that store brands aren't an antitrust issue like Apple Music is--if a retailer tries to leverage its store brand over the branded competition, the brands can simply stop selling to the retailer, because their products can be purchased in the exact same form at another retailer. This has actually happened before, many times.

Mail, Maps, Stocks, Notes, Reminders fit that same definition. In those cases I imagine they're "value adds." Music (as a store or subscription, not as a player) I don't see being a "value add."

> because their products can be purchased in the exact same form at another retailer.

The Internet is different. I've always been annoyed that if I buy a movie or most ebooks I'm tethered to that platform for playback. I'm very glad thats generally no longer true for music purchases.

Apple may or may not be running AM at a profit or not...that's not the problem. The problem is that they're not subjecting AM to the same competitive pressures as AM's competition, i.e., internally they're not holding AM to the same limitations on billing, marketing, etc. as they're forcing on Spotify, Pandora, etc.

If Apple wanted to run AM in a way that didn't violate Western anti-trust rules, they'd have to make it adhere to the same app store restrictions spotify and the rest face, and they would have to charge it 30% for subscription fees. (AM is a separate legal entity. For tax purposes it may just ultimately be money changing pockets, but for legal and especially for antitrust purposes the fact that there is actual money moving around is what matters.)

How would you classify iMovie, Pages, etc? They were sold on the store and now offered for free and compete with others.

> With Apple, there's no option to provide Spotify to iPhone users except through Apple's own store.

Kindle, Audible, Netflix, HBO and a bunch of others have been on there for years. Netflix tested the waters with subscribing through Apple and went back to offering it outside of the store. I don't think Kindle ever has.

It’s like buying a house that can contain products from a special store that sells cheaper and better versions of name brand products that conform to your house’s design. If you move into a house built by another company, suddenly you must shop at a store where the options are more expensive and you lose access to some of the things you bought for your old house.

They're talking about the lock-in of the App Store and competing with Apple Music. Your argument sounds more applicable to music purchases than a subscription service. Especially with a subscription, it seems more similar to the independent butcher/bread maker competing with a grocery store analogy brought up elsewhere in this thread.

I'm a bit lost on the house analogy and how that applies to Spotify and Apple Music.

The broader issue here is that if you tie bundle things together as features of a single product, a for-profit company has little incentive to improve them. We don't get the best product/feature possible but the worst one whose lack of quality can still be compensated by other features/products.

Saying "they're a feature trying to be a product" instead of properly regulating the market does not result in a functioning market but in WeChat.

And I disagree with the idea that music streaming is really a product. The streaming services don't own any content; they're basically just the packaging around other people's content. And, unlike cable TV providers, who also package other people's content, music streaming services do not own the last mile to the customer. The other natural comparison would be to Netflix, but Netflix has exclusive content (mainly because they were intelligent enough to realize early on that they would end up where Spotify is now if they didn't develop their own content). The only thing music streaming services really bring to the table is playlist curation and discovery. That doesn't seem very substantial to me and, in that light, it's not a surprise to me that an independent music streaming service would struggle to make money.

I don't think meat and bakery departments are features under a definition useful for this discussion. For me, a product is something you can pay for separately, a feature is part of a product.

That means meat and baked goods[1] are separate products. Supermarkets having meat and bakery departments is not much of an issue because it's perfectly reasonable to buy meat from a butcher and other groceries in a supermarket.[2] You cannot really mix Android and iOS apps.

Also: "and quality has probably stagnated or gone down as a result" does sound like an issue. However in this case, I guess it's either because supermarkets are cheaper or because buying everything in one place is more convenient. The latter is a natural advantage of supermarkets. Putting all stores in one place would be good for the customer by lowering the cost of shopping at multiple stores but it's physically impossible.[3]

Apple's advantage on its own platform, in contrast, is the result of anticompetitive behavior and could be avoided.

> The only thing music streaming services really bring to the table is playlist curation and discovery.

Size of the catalog? Different clients? Even if music streaming was purely a commodity, why can't a commodity be a product? Even electricity is.

[1] I guess you could technically consider meat and bakery departments services. But in that case, does such a thing as a good even exist?

[2] Geography aside. If the stores are too far apart, shopping at both is unreasonable. But I would be surprised if you didn't see any issues in such a case.

[3] A supermarket that somehow actively stops competitors from opening near it would be acting competitively. Concentrating all stores in one place does have pose the issue of increasing customers' distance to the nearest store. But that's easy to solve when we're violating the laws of physics anyway.