Well, Apple just want to "grow the pie."

Although growing on the pie seems a more apt metaphor. Defending 15% fees on second-year subscription is pretty difficult. There's no marketing, very little fraud risk. It's really rent-seeking behaviour – which of course is the commercial point of the walled garden approach.

This is Apple exploiting a very lucrative market position, one that they did invest quite a lot of money in – and took quite a gamble – to create.

> This is Apple exploiting a very lucrative market position, one that they did invest quite a lot of money in – and took quite a gamble – to create.

What's wrong with that?

Consumers get perma-shafted.

Counterargument: consumers are free to switch their entire phone to enjoy the rent-seeking behavior of another party on another platform.

Definitely no counter-arguments from me. Because of Apple's pricing insanity, I've made sure I own zero of their devices, and I think every person capable of independent thought should do the same.

Spotify pays artists a fraction of what Apple pays.

Do you have a reference for that?

Thanks for that link. It took a second to dig through the layers of news posts to find the original story/data:

https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/spotify-ap...

It looks like Google Play (Google Music?) still wins for compensating artists the most so it's nice to see my choice still holds up over time.

To save people the click:

* Google Play $0.0068 * iTunes $0.0060 * Spotify $0.0044

I've heard the argument about this is that Spotify has a free tier, and free listens pay out less.

And this makes sense. They are counting the value paid per 1000 plays. If most of users in spotify are free, the average will be lower. Also, spotify has more plays than apple, so the final value paid might be higher.

This makes me wonder if $ per play is the right metric, versus $ per artist per platform. If you get paid less per play on Spotify, but get many more plays there would that still be a better deal?