Over the past few months, Spotify has been exceedingly vocal and critical about the way in which Apple manages the App Store. Specifically, Spotify takes issue with Apple’s 30% cut, with Spotify CEO Daniel Ek a few months ago categorizing the 30% figure as an unfair tax on competitors that have to compete with Apple.
For what it’s worth, Spotify stopped taking sign-ups via the app in 2016, which is to say that Spotify now pays a 15% cut to Apple for users who previously signed up for the service via the app. That notwithstanding, Spotify has passionately argued that Apple’s rules regarding the App Store run afoul of antitrust law.
A few months ago, Spotify filed a formal complaint with the European Commission over Apple’s App Store practices, a move that sparked Apple to argue that Spotify “seeks to keep all the benefits of the App Store ecosystem — including the substantial revenue that they draw from the App Store’s customers — without making any contributions to that marketplace.”
Flash forward a few months and the squabbling between Apple and Spotify has only intensified. Earlier today, Apple’s response to Spotify’s EU complaint was made public by the German publication Der Spiegel. Among other things, Apple pointed out that Spotify isn’t even paying Apple that much money to begin with.
Specifically, Apple notes that it only receives a 15% cut from approximately 680,000 Spotify subscribers. The figure may seem like quite a bit until you realize that it just represents less than 1% of Spotify’s total user base which includes more than 200 million paying and non-paying customers. Of that, Spotify has approximately 100 million paying customers.
