Google And Spotify Special Agreement Revealed At Antitrust Session

Spotify and Google have an undisclosed special agreement (photo: dock. unsplash)

JAKARTA Spotify has a special agreement with Google regarding the commission system on the Google Play Store. This agreement was revealed during the antitrust versus Epic Games trial.

Reported by The Verge, the deal gives Spotify the privilege of not bringing the commission to Google if Spotify uses its own side payments on Android.

On the other hand, Spotify still has to pay the commission if a user pays a subscription using Google payments. However, this commission is only four percent, far less than Google's determination of 15 percent.

In addition to its much less commission, both parties agreed to set aside 50 million US dollars (Rp773.9 billion) each as a success fund. There is no further explanation of this success fund.

'Listening to music is one of the core goals of mobile phones... if Spotify doesn't work well across Play services and core services, people won't buy Android phones,' Google Chief Partner Don Harrison said at trial.

Although Google is trying to provide a reasonable alibi, Epic Games uses the deal as one of the illegal monopoly acts operated on the Google Play Store.

For information, Epic Games sued Google in 2020 because the Fortnite game the company developed was forcibly removed from the Google Play Store. This removal occurred because Epic used Google's banned third-party payment system.

Initially Epic teamed up with Spotify to fight Google. However, in 2022, the music platform will stop competing with Google after struck an agreement.