The EU on Tuesday said it would probe tech giant Apple Inc’s plan to buy leading song recognition app Shazam Entertainment Ltd because of fears the deal might “adversely affect competition.”
Apple announced the deal with London-based Shazam, worth a reported US$400 million, in December last year in a fresh bid to secure an edge in the intensifying battle of streaming services.
The European Commission said it launched the inquiry at the request of EU states Austria, France, Italy, Spain and Sweden, and non-EU nations Norway and Iceland, which form part of the affiliated European Economic Area.
“The commission considers that the transaction may have a significant adverse effect on competition in the European Economic Area,” the commission said in a statement.
The deal did not meet the “turnover thresholds” for the European Commission for Brussels to launch a probe by itself.
Instead, it had to wait for Austria to lodge an initial request, which was followed by the other states.
Shazam, which was founded in 1999 in the early age of online music, has offered a solution to a long-time agony of listeners — putting a name to elusive songs. With a click, the app identifies tracks playing on the radio, at parties or as background music.
However, Shazam has struggled to find a way to make money off its technology, even as it said that it had reached 1 billion downloads on smartphones last year.
Shazam only recently announced it had become profitable, thanks to advertising and steering traffic to other sites, such as Spotify and Apple Music.
The technology is also no longer quite as novel, with Shazam facing rivals such as SoundHound and with smartphones capable of ever more advanced recognition functions.
MARKET LEADERSHIP: Investors are flocking to Nvidia, drawn by the company’s long-term fundamntals, dominant position in the AI sector, and pricing and margin power Two years after Nvidia Corp made history by becoming the first chipmaker to achieve a US$1 trillion market capitalization, an even more remarkable milestone is within its grasp: becoming the first company to reach US$4 trillion. After the emergence of China’s DeepSeek (深度求索) sent the stock plunging earlier this year and stoked concerns that outlays on artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure were set to slow, Nvidia shares have rallied back to a record. The company’s biggest customers remain full steam ahead on spending, much of which is flowing to its computing systems. Microsoft Corp, Meta Platforms Inc, Amazon.com Inc and Alphabet Inc are
Luxury fashion powerhouse Prada SpA has acknowledged the ancient Indian roots of its new sandal design after the debut of the open-toe footwear sparked a furor among Indian artisans and politicians thousands of miles from the catwalk in Italy. Images from Prada’s fashion show in Milan last weekend showed models wearing leather sandals with a braided design that resembled handmade Kolhapuri slippers with designs dating back to the 12th century. A wave of criticism in the media and from lawmakers followed over the Italian brand’s lack of public acknowledgement of the Indian sandal design, which is named after a city in the
The US overtaking China as Taiwan’s top export destination could boost industrial development and wage growth, given the US is a high-income economy, an economist said yesterday. However, Taiwan still needs to diversify its export markets due to the unpredictability of US President Donald Trump’s administration, said Chiou Jiunn-rong (邱俊榮), an economics professor at National Central University. Taiwan’s exports soared to a record US$51.74 billion last month, driven by strong demand for artificial intelligence (AI) products and continued orders, with information and communication technology (ICT) and audio/video products leading all sectors. The US reclaimed its position as Taiwan’s top export market, accounting for
NEW MODELS: AI researchers are facing challenges in managing deceptive behaviors, with limited regulation and testing, as the race for advanced models intensifies The world’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models are exhibiting troubling new behaviors — lying, scheming and even threatening their creators to achieve their goals. In one particularly jarring example, under threat of being unplugged, Anthropic PBC’s latest creation, Claude 4, lashed back by blackmailing an engineer and threatening to reveal an extramarital affair. Meanwhile, ChatGPT creator OpenAI’s o1 tried to download itself onto external servers and denied it when caught red-handed. These episodes highlight a sobering reality: More than two years after ChatGPT shook the world, AI researchers still do not fully understand how their own creations work. Yet the race to
RSS