In what may be a move to appear like less of a walled garden, Apple approved the Spotify steaming-music application for the iPhone this week. Spotify announced the news Friday with gratitude for the iPhone maker.
Spotify offers legal and free access to a library of music through its streaming music player. The company’s dream is to let everyone listen to whatever they want, whenever they want, and wherever they want. Getting its application into the iPhone App Store brings the company one step closer to a dream come true.
“Spotify on the iPhone will include many of the features our users enjoy on the desktop, with the added advantage of letting you listen to your playlists even when you haven’t got a network connection — for instance, when on a plane or the underground,” said Spotify’s Jonatan Littke.
Antitrust Concerns
Apple has previously allowed streaming on the iPhone, but this is the first time the company has allowed caching with a well-known music application. That puts the Spotify app in quasi-competition with the iTunes Store.
“If you are listening to streaming music with caching, in effect that’s an all-you-can-eat model and you don’t need iTunes, at least not for music. You would certainly need iTunes for video content,” said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group. “Apple denied Slacker the right to cache, so this is interesting.”
Enderle said Apple may be allowing Spotify to cache because of the increasing federal scrutiny of the company’s practices. As he sees it, not allowing Slacker to cache its music was a competitive move, much like removing Google Voice from the iPhone. With the feds looking over its shoulder, Apple may be in the mood to loosen up its application-approval guidelines.
“Apple is being much more lenient at the moment because they don’t suddenly want to be…