But that's a too simple way to look at it. I am not trying to defend the 30%, but just saying 'their own apps do not have to pay 30%, so they can easily replace any app with their own' doesn't go far enough.
They got two options:
a) make a 30% on $10/month from Spotify -> $3 in Apple's bag for no work or effort at all. Almost pure profit.
b) sell their own music solution for $10/month (INSTEAD of that customer going to Spotify) and have to pay out X to musicians, companies, younameit. Higher hosting and streaming costs too. If X>$7/month Apple loses. If it's $7 Apple earns as much but no more than with option a), if it's less than $7/month only then Apple wins.
I agree with most of what you said, but come on. Running (one of?) the biggest software distribution and payment processing systems on the planet is hardly "no work or effort at all".
This is the same sort of rhetoric that calls dropbox a weekend project.
There's credit card costs etc associated with that as well. Doubt it's $3/user per month though and the distribution costs are minimal (only downloads of app updates) compared to the streaming costs (which could be multiple GBs every month).
Apple: $ to build the app, $ to maintain the music label relationships, $ to manage paying royalties, $ to manage server infra, $ for bandwidth.
Spotify: $ to build the app, $ to maintain the music label relationships, $ to manage paying royalties, $ to manage server infra, $ for bandwidth, $ to Apple for the "privilege" of being listed on the App Store and using Apple's payments system (which they have no choice over).
Both companies have the exact same base costs to operate their service. But Apple gets to charge for subscriptions through the app for free, whereas Spotify does not. That's literally the only difference cost-wise, and IMO Spotify is correct to consider that anti-competitive. Whether or not Apple would make more or less money shuttering Apple Music and transferring all their customers to Spotify is completely irrelevant.
And no, I don't consider "creating and maintaining an iOS payments system" to be a part of Apple's costs here. That would exist even if Apple Music did not, and the marginal cost of having Apple Music use that system is virtually nil, certainly not 30% of Spotify's subscription fee.
From what you're saying it sounds like Spotify should have built a smartphone platform. It's not free for Apple to build and maintain the App Store and everything that entails—from API documentation to the rock solid software platform that is being kept up to date and is astonishingly robust compared to any internet-connected consumer platform that came before it.
Some apps pay for that effort with a cut of the app's retail price. Spotify pays for it with the tiny fraction of their users which (a) pay for it at all and (b) pay for it through their iOS device.
There’s clearly a difference between moving money from one internal balance sheet to another, and moving it to an entirely different company’s balance sheet.
