Back in December, Apple announced its intention to buy Shazam. While acquisitions like this are always subject to some delay while they make it through the
Back in December, Apple announced its intention to buy Shazam. While acquisitions like this are always subject to some delay while they make it through the regulatory process, this one in particular hit a pretty big roadblock when the European Commission announced a full-blown investigation into whether or not the deal would be anti-competitive. That investigation was announced back in April, and now it seems that the EU has reached its decision.
As reported by Reuters, the European Commission has determined that Apple’s acquisition of Shazam isn’t anti-competitive like it initially feared. While you might expect that the Commission was worried about Apple using Shazam’s music identification service to promote Apple Music over other competitors, that actually wasn’t at the core of its concerns. Instead, it was worried about Apple potentially using Shazam’s user data to directly target subscribers of other services and tempt them over to Apple Music.
In a statement to Reuters, EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager said that the Commission doesn’t believe that Apple’s acquisition of Shazam’s data would violate antitrust rules. “Data is key in the digital economy,” Vestager said, explaining the reason for the investigation. “We must therefore carefully review transactions which lead to the acquisition of important sets of data, including potentially commercially sensitive ones.”
With this approval from the European Commission, Apple is pretty much in the clear to finish its acquisition of Shazam. We don’t know how much Apple is paying for the service, but with recent funding rounds putting the value of Shazam at around $1 billion, there’s a good chance that Apple is paying a lot of cash for the opportunity to add the company to its portfolio.
The deal will probably be finalized in the coming days (or weeks), and maybe then we’ll find out what Apple’s larger plan for Shazam is. We’ll almost certainly see Shazam begin to point toward Apple Music when it identifies songs, but it’s been doing some work with AR that Apple may be interested in as well. Stay tuned.
