Shazam lands on your Mac
Last December, the Cupertino-based company announced the official purchase of Shazam, the most popular music recognition service in the world, although not the only one, since in the market we can find different alternatives equal to or better than those that Shazam offers us.
But when a company or service becomes part of a large one, its popularity can become a threat to competition and / or related services. That is precisely what the European Union has thought, which at the beginning of February stated that it was looking for compelling reasons to investigate this purchase. Reasons that he has apparently found.
The antitrust commission of the European Union has just announced that The investigation of the purchase of Shazam by Apple has begun, a British company for which Apple paid just over $ 400 million. Initially, this purchase should not be subject to investigation, but because it is the most used application worldwide, European regulators are concerned about how the purchase by Apple can benefit this service and harm the alternatives that there are currently on the market.
According to the European Union, Apple could take advantage of all the data of registered users of Shazam's paid and free service, to encourage them to switch to Apple Music, Apple's music streaming service, with Spotify, Deezer, SoundCloud and other streaming music services affected by this purchase. To prevent regulators from seeing this purchase with bad eyes, Apple just has to continue as before, allowing users to listen to the songs they recognize with any music streaming service currently available on the market.