DoJ making preliminary inquiries into Apple’s music endeavors

by Ed Valio on May 27, 2010

in All

Apparently the DOJ wants to make sure that you can get your Justin Bieber fix somewhere other than iTunes on New Music Tuesday.  Not too much detail out there on this one, but we’re keeping our collective ear to the ground.  There has to be more to this than just exclusivity in debuting new songs, right?

From Engadget:

It’s all just noise right now, but the United States Justice Department is purportedly having a “very preliminary conversation” with Apple regarding the company’s music business, wondering in particular if anything it’s doing (or has done) would violate antitrust legislation. According to unnamed sources familiar with the situation, DoJ staff seem most interested in whether or not Apple’s dominance in the market enabled it to unfairly prevent Amazon’s music service from exclusively debuting new songs.

Engadget – DoJ making preliminary inquiries into Apple’s music endeavors while iTunes dominance continues

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  • http://www.projectcounsel.com Gregory Bufithis

    Ed: this investigation started in March. The DOJ contacted Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music and EMI. It is part of a broad inquiry about competition and pricing in digital music although this particular focus is on Apple’s response to the promotional initiatives by Amazon.com. It may lead to nothing. But remember that iTunes remains the most important digital storefront for the record labels at a time when growth in legal downloads, while slowing, contrasts starkly with the continued fall in compact disc sales. And realize that the iTunes music store sells 69 per cent of all digital downloads in the US and controls 28 per cent of the retail music market. I work in this area on the IP side over in Europe … besides sipping fine wine.