> Once upon a time, Apple was the iPod company [and] a dominan | on product

> Once upon a time, Apple was the iPod company [and] a dominant force in the music industry. (...) The switch to streaming also meant that music lost the strategic leverage (...) - if you switched between stores you lost all the music you’d already bought, but if you switch streaming services you only lose your playlists, if that. Music stopped mattering as a way to lock people into an ecosystem, and it stopped being a strategic lever.

> Apple TV never really went anywhere, and today, Apple doesn’t matter much more in TV than it does in music. (...) Disney, Netflix and HBO own their shows, their apps and their subscriptions, and Amazon is big in TV because it spends billions of dollars buying TV shows, not because of software. (...) Perhaps it’s because the dynamics of a market with hundreds of shows is different to a market with million of tracks, and perhaps it’s because big media companies had seen what happened to music.

> In 2020 Apple had $15bn in revenue from App Store, (…) and another $10bn of pure margin from Google [to be the default search engine in Safari]. Netflix’s total revenue in 2020 was… $25bn, and it had to spend $15bn buying TV shows to get that. (...) The EU has already decided against [Apple] in Spotify’s complaint. (...) [But even if] Epic, or perhaps Tencent, reputedly 10% of Apple’s commissions, persuade people to enter a credit card, Apple’s system will still have lower friction. (…) Maybe missing TV and streaming music turned out OK for Apple.

> Apple is tracking a lot of user data [to serve ads in the App Store, Stocks and News apps], but nothing leaves your phone. (...) [In] Google’s proposed FLoC, [Chrome] uses the web pages you visit to put you into anonymised interest-based cohorts without your browsing history itself leaving your device. (...) What happens if Apple opens up its cohort tracking and targeting (...) on a platform with at least 60% of US mobile traffic, and over a billion global users?

> Google gives away a free smartphone operating system to support its ad business, and Amazon gives away free TV shows to support its ecommerce business. (...) Apple looks for businesses it can transform with simplicity and control, and take a cut, without owning anything itself, and where it can use that to leverage hardware sales. That worked for music, failed for TV, succeeded massively in smartphone apps and especially games, and has done OK in payments. How about advertising?

> On the other hand, this may be a case of what [Steven Sinofsky] likes to call the ‘Dr Evil’ theory of company strategy. The press used to see five or ten things going on in different parts of Microsoft (...) and say “Aha! We have worked out their evil brilliant plan!” (...), except [Microsoft] could never make it work. (...) Google and Facebook (…) have whole city blocks in Manhattan full of advertising people. (...) You can’t launch an ad platform in iOS 15 next month and then wait a year to add new stuff in iOS 16. And even more, Apple has always been ambivalent about the web itself.

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/5/13/apples-ads-music