I don't understand this argument. Spotify is a service connecting listeners to the artists and infrastructure and development of said service has its cost whereas Google/Apple charge fees for the app store which Spotify subscription does not require.
So, Spotify is allowed to charge 30% for access to the market it has created, but Google and Apple are not?
An app store costs money too - the creation and maintenance of the billing platform/API, bandwidth, human curation, cross-device storage of saved configurations, user acquisition, etc.
What makes musicians so different from software developers that it's perfectly acceptable for Spotify to take such a large share of the revenue their music has earned?
(To make my own position clear, I don't think any of them deserve 30%)
Because Apple and a Google created a market where there was none. It basically impossible to make money from selling mobile apps to consumers before them.
Had Verizon singlehandedly created the internet and had no real competitors they might have been able to tax it’s usage. Thank God that did not happen, though…
I am fine with them charging whatever they want, as long as they don't prevent competitors from opening alternative markets. The problem is the monopoly, not the price.
Spotify has very low margins so it's hard to say 30% isn't fair. Any lower they'd have trouble paying their costs. Streaming in general helped the music industry revenue grow. You can say Spotify might be bad at business for not making much money on a 30% cut, but overall they seem to be serving decent value for money to the copyright holders and customers. Before streaming, the overhead was a lot higher, with the retail distribution chain taking a comparable cut.
> Verizon's infrastructure costs money, too - should they also be eligible for a 30% tax?
> The data will be transmitted through Cisco routers or Nokia's BTS - it costs a lot of R&D to develop those
This is a novel idea. Verizon and Cisco could charge a price above their cost. They could call this a "profit margin". You might be on to something here.
Apple/Google app stores are a service connecting users to app creators, and all the points about Spotify also apply to Apple and Google. In the case of Apple, they literally created the entire market, from the CPUs all the way up.
If 30% is too much, publish your content as a web app. If you want to play in the walled garden, pay the cover charge.
I think the biggest difference is that Spotify isn't a monopoly at the end of the day - it's a popular service. A lot of people still use different methods to listen to music like YouTube, iTunes, bandcamp and a plethora of others. If you, as a band, want to make money on your music you aren't required to do business through spotify, it's a choice that most people make because it's free money.
On the other hand if you want to write an app for a mobile device you're, realistically, either going to write it for Android or iOS. On the Android side you can distribute it as an apk assuming you can handle the cost of writing self-updating code - but on the iOS side you're hooped. Mobile devices are a part of modern life, the fact that one company dominates the market (and another company takes the remainder) leaves the market extremely unhealthy.
Google Play, which charges 30%, is not a monopoly either. Nor is Steam. The Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo scene is a bit less clear, but they charge 30% too.
Musicians have about the same freedom in this respect as any application developer, practically speaking. AKA, they're just as exploited (if not moreso, see other comments about how musicians are also being screwed over by studios).
Yep. One major difference is that with Google/Apple (and also Steam I believe), app makers can at least choose the price of their apps and services themselves, and they know how many units they sell. If Google/Apple are charging you 30%, just increase your price.
With Spotify, however, musicians can't choose how much their music is worth, and the payment of royalties is also not exactly transparent.
But the very concept of being an mobile app developer was brought to life by Apple, and later Google. 15 years ago, you could not really be a pro app dev. Now, you can, but with a 30% cut. You are strictly better off. And if you think the 30% is too much, do something else.
These companies created something that grew into a foundational element of modern life in about a decade. That’s amazing and should be awarded with trillions of dollars. The market should reward this corporate behaviour extremely well, and punish the IBMs and GEs and Boeings harshly.
As an aside, Apple et al are also not resting on their laurels, and keep pushing the envelope. My 2 y.o. + iPhone is literally better than on the day I bought it. I’m more than happy to pay more for apps / subs to get this.
The developer who made a useful website with a link to their paypal has been mostly obsoleted by app developers. Small tool development isn't a novel creation of modern mobile devices - it's just the packaging of these into bespoke binaries that have highly regulated distribution channels. A cynical person might assume that part of the reason Apple hated flash so much is that it threatened to stunt the upcoming app market. To lend some credence to this position, things like Kofi have taken off in recent (on my scale) years as HTML5 gained enough traction to essentially duplicate the functionality of flash without any of the security issues - I personally think this is what led to the feature to save websites as apps on iOS and that is something that doesn't threaten Apple much with their network advantage, but has the potential to cut into their revenue if it gets popular enough.
The problem is when that innovative company becomes the new IBM/GE/Oracle and starts treating every client as nothing else but a revenue stream instead of focusing on creating new and innovative products. I don’t think Apple/Google are there yet but they are clearly moving into that direction.
Apple and Google are responsible for 99% of all mobile software distribution[1]. They both monopolize the mobile app distribution market, as well as the mobile app payment markets.
Both firms leveraged their dominance in the mobile OS market to dominate the mobile app distribution market, and then they leveraged their dominance in the mobile app distribution market to dominate the mobile app payments market.
When talking about monopolies, the working definition is firms that have significant and durable market power such that they can set prices and exclude competitors[2]. Both Apple and Google fit that bill for the mobile OS, app distribution and payments markets. Whether you use the words monopoly, duopoly or cartel to describe them doesn't really matter, because all of those terms are accurate descriptors.
I'm from EU and in my country, RSUs are considered a kind of salary and taxed in the same manner so perhaps they will have to be mentioned as well? The idea is that you can get paid for your work by different means, money being only one of them.
RSU value at vesting is taxed like salary in the US too (gains post vesting would be taxed less at capital gains rates if one doesn’t immediately sell).
My neighbor has a Galaxy S21 Ultra. It had ads last week.
Out of all sucky Android devices and due to my work I probably touched at least 3/4 of models sold via non-grey market channel in the US the only phones that are functional are Pixels, which sucks.
My wife has an iPhone 12. Pixel 6 today is either in the same class or beats it. Of course it is highly unlikely that it will beat it in 2024 given Google track record of refusing to reiterate.
Asked about the Halix situation, the commission said on Friday that the EMA was ready to fast-track authorisation of new production facilities once it received an application and the necessary information from AstraZeneca.
I don't really understand what's going on with the Halix plant, but surely there must be more to it than that. There's presumably no way the EMA are just sitting there going "well we can't do anything until they mail us over the papers".
Certainly the UK MHRA have been working closely with the companies to move the process along very quickly, as has been confirmed by both the government and the companies themselves.
I'm curious to know what's really going on at the Halix plant.
Knowing how these sorts of regulations work, there's probably considerable scope for speeding things up by parallelising. That's apparently how the MHRA went faster. Usually the regulator would demand a complete pack of information in specific formats, etc, so you have to wait for all the components to be ready before submission (which may well cost money, I'm not sure, but for corporate approvals like that it often does).
In the absence of further guidance and given the EU's hostility to them so far, AZ may be waiting to ensure it has all its ducks in a row before submitting.
In the UK the regulator was willing to do partial processing of applications in parallel with the project being executed, which isn't normal and poses obvious complexities, but can speed things up when latency is what matters most. If the EMA hasn't indicated any willingness to do that, and it's not the first time they've come up with this "we're waiting for submission" business, then it may be causing artificial delays.
It is in EMAs interest to do incremental processing and this is what they have been doing in other cases.
It is in AZs interest to not start the process which would make the factory available for EU, where AZ is not willing to deliver at this time. (Instead, they ship doses even from the EU factories to UK and elsewhere.)
Given this, you would need something concrete to back your speculation to the contrary.
Can you provide a citation for the EMA doing parallel processing because I have yet to hear about that and in fact read the opposite.
It's not in AZ's interest to keep an expensive factory idled in an environment of unprecedented demand, obviously. They want to sell vaccine to whoever will take it. AZ is "unwilling" to deliver to the EU because it has signed contracts putting other countries first and they are able to consume the entire supply. Once the UK is done, they will suddenly become "willing" (if such a term makes sense when contracts are involved) to deliver to the EU as well.
So to be clear, you are describing factual statements as speculation (which is wrong) and then making spurious claims about AZ/EMA's claimed interests instead of what they're actually doing.
> Can you provide a citation for the EMA doing parallel processing
"Rolling review" is the term I've seen typically used for the process that you described, and Wikipedia has references for various rolling reviews by EMA starting with the following: "In October 2020, the Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use (CHMP) of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) started 'rolling reviews' of the vaccines known as COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca (ChAdOx1-SARS-CoV-2) and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine (BNT162b2)."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_COVID-19_vaccine_de...
Then I wonder how it has ended in a situation where a factory is apparently ready to go to produce but is waiting for regulatory approval, and the regulators are claiming they're waiting for paperwork to be submitted. That shouldn't be possible in a genuinely parallel review process.
Again, this is simply not true. Yes, the UK signed one particular contract on Aug 28, so one day after the EU with AZ. However, the UK had a binding contract with AZ since May.
"However, the key lies in an earlier agreement that AstraZeneca made back in May with the U.K., which was a binding deal establishing “the development of a dedicated supply chain for the U.K.,” an AstraZeneca spokesperson said."
Go team is now working on an offical LSP server called gopls and have in fact just recently publishes first alpha release so hopefully, the situation will improve in a while.
Yes, using gopls is the way how I finally got some support for modules for the first time since they were released (single module only though - useless for monorepo).
