Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of Business Wars ad-free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app. It's June 2015 and in his Southern California home, Jimmy Iovine jolts awake to the sound of his phone vibrating on an ice stand. He squints at the clock. It's 6 30 a.m. Nothing good ever happens this early on a Sunday. Iovine is 62, wiry, intense, and a legend in the music business. He's worked with Bruce Springsteen and U2. His record label, Interscope, discovered Eminem and Lady Gaga, and he co-founded Beats with Dr. Dre. Now he's helping launch Apple Music, which is scheduled to go live in just nine days. For years, Apple's iTunes store dominated digital music, but now Spotify is disrupting that model entirely, ushering in the streaming era. Apple hopes to use Apple Music to claw back the ground it has lost to its Swedish rival. Iovine reaches for his phone. It's Eddie Q, the senior vice president in charge of Apple Music. Eddie? No, I was sleeping. Iovine puts on his thin frame glasses and pulls up Swift's Tumblr page. On it, the pop star declares that contrary to reports, her latest album 1989 won't be available to stream on Apple Music, and she explains why, because Apple won't pay artists and labels during the service's three-month free trial. Swift's words cut like a knife. We don't ask you for free iPhones. Please don't ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation. Iovine knows this is bad. Swift's already pulled her music from Spotify because it pays too little. Apple hoped to secure the streaming rights to 1989. Getting them would be a major coup, proof that Apple Music offers more than Spotify. Instead, the company is now in a very public standoff with America's biggest pop star. Iovine hangs up and calls Scott Borschetta, the head of Swift's record label. Uh, Scott, what's going on with Taylor's letter? We're still in talks about this. Is this some sort of negotiation tactic? I didn't put her up to it. She just sent it. But honestly, she has a point. As a former record executive, Iovine gets it. But right now, he's got bigger concerns. Apple Music is just days from launch. The marketing strategy is locked, and the messaging is set. And now, instead of a triumphant debut, the story threatening to dominate the headlines is that Apple, one of the richest companies in the world, doesn't want to pay artists. This could derail the entire rollout and hand Spotify another win. From Audible Originals, I'm David Brown, and this is Business Wars. Apple's clash with Taylor Swift is just the opening salvo in a much larger fight. A battle with Spotify for the future of music. By 2015, music streaming is no longer just an experiment. It's the coming wave, and on its way to becoming the $20 billion market it is today. But to understand how Apple ended up scrambling in 2015, we have to rewind almost a decade to a time when Apple seemed untouchable. In 2006, its iTunes store owned digital music. If you wanted a song online, you paid $0.99 and downloaded it. Apple thought it had solved the future of music. But in Sweden, a young entrepreneur had a different vision, one where people could access music instantly and ideally for free. His startup, Spotify, hatched a bold plan to challenge Apple's hold on music. But Spotify's success was anything but inevitable. And before it could go toe to toe with Apple, it would first have to overcome a collapsing industry, hostile record label executives, and a culture that had grown comfortable with piracy. This is Episode 1, Who Stopped the Music? It's May 2006, and on the outskirts of Stockholm, Sweden, dozens of police are marching into a data center. They're here to shut down the pirate bay, an infamous file sharing site where more than a million people illegally share music, films, and more. The police open server cabinets, disconnect cables, remove hard drives before sliding them into evidence bags. Across the country, similar raids are underway, and the people behind the pirate bay are being taken in for questioning. But this is a small victory in a far bigger war. A war the music industry has been losing for years. Consumers are swapping CDs for digital downloads, and many would rather pirate music than pay for songs. Over the past five years, the value of the global music business has fallen by billions of dollars. The industry's tried shutting down piracy sites and suing people who steal music, but it's an endless game of whack-a-mole. Every time one site disappears, another one pops up, and just three days after the police raids, the pirate bay is back online. The only ray of light for the music industry is Apple's iTunes Store, the dominant legal marketplace for downloads. In fact, the industry now depends on it. But millions more people are choosing to get their music for free, illegally. Music executives fear the future resembles what's happening in Sweden. By the time iTunes arrived there, Swedes were already used to pirating music. Swedish attitudes around copyright infringement are so lax that the U.S. had to threaten trade sanctions to force the takedown of the pirate bay. Many music execs think Sweden's a lost cause. Instead, it's about to offer a new hope for the embattled business. It's August 2006, and in Barcelona, Daniel Eck stands at the end of a long table scattered with tapas plates and wine glasses. Around the table are a handful of engineers, the first employees of a company that, until now, has been shrouded in secrecy. Eck is a shy, slightly rump old 23-year-old swede with thinning hair. He's a very good singer, and Eck is a shy, slightly rump old 23-year-old swede with thinning hair. And he's just co-founded Spotify with his pal, Martin Lorenzen. Eck is the CEO and visionary. Lorenzen, the money man, is a 37-year-old who made millions in ad tech and is now bankrolling Spotify. And the engineers at the table, they're Spotify's first hires. Eck clears his throat to get their attention. I feel it's time to end the secrecy and share our plans. The team snaps to attention. Eck and Lorenzen have been cagey about those plans. All the engineers have been told so far is that Spotify is going to do something with Torrance, the technology behind file sharing sites like the Pirate Bay. Martin and I knew we wanted to start a streaming business that would earn revenue from advertising. So we asked ourselves, what drives the web traffic advertisers wine? We considered movies and audiobooks, but we kept coming back to music, not just because people love it, but because the file sizes are small and ideal for streaming. So that's our plan. We're going to build a free music streaming service. The engineers look both concerned and intrigued. In 2006, streaming's still a technical challenge. While it's possible to download songs in seconds, streaming's still vulnerable to shaky connections. Eck presses on. Right now, people already listen to music online, but it's almost always pirated. Our competition isn't Apple, it's the pirates. If we can build something better than piracy, you know, something faster and easier, people will switch because we'll be better, we'll be legal, and we'll be free. An engineer raises his hand. But why would people choose Spotify? Because we'll give them the best streaming experience, no buffering. You search, you press play, it starts instantly, or more accurately within 200 milliseconds, but fast enough that people can't tell the difference. There's an intake of breath around the table. Eck's dreaming big. But the challenge also fires up the team. The meal dissolves into debate over just how to do it. They discuss breaking songs into fragments so playback can begin before the entire file downloads. They could use people's data to try to predict what song they'll play next and preload it. Maybe they could use a smaller alternative to the usual mp3 file format and a peer-to-peer network instead of centralized servers for more stability. They're energized by the technical challenges, but what they don't talk about is how to license the music. They think the tech will be the hard part. Back in Stockholm, the team creates an impressively fast service. Others have built music streaming services before, but they've been janky. Spotify's desktop plan is smooth and fast. Just search, click play, and enjoy. But their service is worthless without music. So with the tech ready, Eck moves to phase two of his plan, convincing the music publishers and record labels to let Spotify stream their tracks. It's late 2007 and inside the Manhattan offices of Universal Music Group, Eck is sitting in a conference room across from executives at the world's largest record label. Universal, along with Sony, BMG, Warner, and EMI, is one of the four major record labels. Together, they control the majority of commercially released music. Without them on board, Spotify's catalog won't be comprehensive enough to compete with the pirate sites. Universal's executives are impressed by Spotify's tech, but they remain wary of licensing music to it, and Eck's frustration is starting to show. What you need to understand is we're the answer here. Your industry is in decline. Spotify will turn millions of pirates back into customers. You'll never win by trying to police your way out of this. Daniel, Spotify's technology is great, but advertising won't generate enough revenue. We'd be a whole lot more excited about a subscription model. No, ad revenue is a must. We're competing against free. Don't you understand? If there's no free option, people won't switch. Well, we think a half to one percent stream on a sliding scale is more appropriate. No, no, no, no. That's too much. We can discuss a higher revenue share percentage and advances. We can offer advanced royalty payments. No, we're just not into this ad revenue model. You're asking us to reduce the value of our artist's music. A free tier sends a message to consumers that music has no value. Eck purses his lips. They're going around in circles and can't come to an agreement. And it's not just universal. The other major labels aren't on board either. Neither is Merlin, the independent music label rights coalition. Eck is starting to realize that the greatest obstacle to his business isn't piracy. It's the very industry he believes he is saving from the pirates. After the meeting, Eck's negotiating team tells him it's time to accept that the labels are not going to give in. They will keep saying no until Spotify runs out of money. Spotify needs to rethink its approach. Eck knows his team is right. The failure to secure music rights has left Spotify stuck. It can't attract new investors. And without a product on the market, the company is burning through its startup capital at an alarming rate. So Spotify rewrites its business plan. It's now a freemium business. Users can listen for free with ads or they can pay a monthly subscription fee to remove ads and gain extra features. It's a compromise designed to reassure labels that paid revenue will be part of the mix. It's July 2008 and in Manhattan, Eck steps out of 75 Rockefeller Plaza feeling dazed and confused. He's just had a meeting with Warner Music's US executives. He hoped they would embrace Spotify's new freemium offer. Instead, they told him that as long as that free tier remains, Warner won't license music to Spotify. Eck looks up. Tall skyscrapers tower above him menacingly. If Warner's out, the other major labels will probably be out too. He feels jet lagged, sick, and crushed. He pulls out his phone and calls his co-founder, Lorenzen. Daniel, how did it go? Uh, badly. They're out. It's over. Uh, Daniel, listen to me. Problems aren't problems. Lorenzen tries to give him a pep talk, but the words don't register. In a matter of weeks, Spotify will run out of cash. Eck will have to fire everyone, hand back the keys to his office, and watch the company disappear before the world ever knows Spotify existed. For a moment, standing there on that Manhattan sidewalk, music streaming feels like it might be over before it even begins. It's 2008 and following Warner music's refusal to license its catalog to Spotify in the U.S., Daniel Eck finds himself revising his startup's business plan again. Spotify's original plan was to launch in Europe and North America at the same time, but the major labels aren't aligned. In the U.S., executives see Spotify's free tier as a deal breaker. In Europe, it's a different story. Their label execs are more open to a model that includes both free and paid listening, and crucially, they don't need to work in lockstep with their American counterparts. They're free to decide what works best for their own markets, and in countries like Sweden, where piracy has gutted sales, the appetite for taking a risk on Spotify, is much greater. Spotify is also willing to take risks because it's running out of time. The company has spent two years trying to secure music licenses, and now its startup capital is almost gone. If Spotify doesn't go live and soon, it will go under. So Eck ditches the U.S. launch and focuses on Europe. But the European label chiefs drive a hard bargain. The record labels and music publishers demand 70% of Spotify's gross revenues. That money will be divided based on what songs users streamed, and whether they're paying subscribers. Spotify will pay the record labels and music publishers, who will then pay the artists their cut. The demands don't stop there. If Spotify's revenues fall short, there are minimum payout guarantees. The labels will also get tens of millions of dollars in advance payments and equity stakes in Spotify. On paper, this is devastating, and it shreds Spotify's financial projections. Think of what's happened here. Spotify agreed to terms that, on the face of it, guarantee years of losses. 70% revenue share, minimums advances, even equity. But you know when a supplier controls something you can't replace, you're not negotiating price, you're negotiating survival. The spreadsheet doesn't tell the whole story. This is not about margins. It's about staying in the game. In August 2008, with the music deals about to be signed, Spotify co-founder Martin Lorenzen secures more than $21 million from investors. That money arrives just in time. At the office celebration, Actel's employees that without that investment, none of them would have been paid at the end of the month. In October 2008, Spotify launches in several European countries, including Finland, France, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the UK. To build buzz, it initially makes the free tier invite only, but it's mostly a marketing trick ahead of a wider launch soon after. Spotify is faking scarcity to fuel interest. In reality, invitations aren't that hard to get. The company also partners with telecom providers and bundles its subscription tiers with broadband internet packages. Spotify gets traction fast. Apple, Amazon, and Best Buy's Napster are still selling songs as downloads, but Spotify's promise of instant access to more than 6 million songs, well, that feels revolutionary. By March 2009, the company has almost 2 million users, but Spotify's not flawless. Some users dislike the 15-second ads that interrupt listening every half hour. Songs from several major acts, including the Beatles, aren't to be found. But the biggest problem is you can only use Spotify on a computer. So, with the launch done, Spotify's engineers get to work on an iPhone app for paying subscribers only. But to get on the iPhone app store, Spotify needs permission from Apple. And it has no idea whether Apple will allow an alternative to iTunes inside its iOS ecosystem. It's August 2009, and in Stockholm, a group of Spotify employees are in a motorboat that's powering towards a nearby island. It's mid-summer, and they want to make the most of the evening sun with a beach trip fueled by sausages, pickled herring, and beer. But as the boat shoots towards its destination, the team starts debating the question everyone at Spotify has been asking. Does Apple always take this long to approve an app? They're probably looking for a reason to say no. There's no reason to say no. We meet their rules. Spotify co-founder Martin Lorenzen cracks open a beer and grins. Their rules. Rules they can change and interpret however they like. Okay, okay, it's time for a bet. I bet you 1,000 kroner that Apple will not approve our app. The engineers hesitate. A thousand Swedish kroners worth around $140. One finally raises his hands. No way. I'm out. Chicken. Later that evening, as the sun sets, the team returns to the city. As they continue the drinking at an open-air restaurant, Lorenzen checks his emails. There's one from Apple. He opens it and shouts out, Apple says, yes, Spotify is going mobile. The app attracts even more users. By late 2009, Spotify has 7 million users, including 250,000 paying subscribers. And these subscribers contribute around 60% of the company's revenue. But Spotify is not making money. Not even close. Most of its income goes to music rights holders, leaving the company with net losses of nearly $27 million. But Spotify's popularity has not gone unnoticed. Across the Atlantic, American media outlets start talking up the European music upstart, giving Americans FOMO. So Spotify revives its efforts to get into the US. But US label execs still remain totally opposed to music being made available for free. And now, Apple is actively working against Spotify's expansion. For Apple, there's more at stake here than losing iTunes customers. This is about the future of smartphones. Apple's CEO Steve Jobs sees music as a powerful way to keep people choosing iOS over Google's Android. iTunes users can't take their music and playlists with them if they switch to Android. And that makes iOS devices sticky. Spotify threatens this lock-in. Its app is available on both iOS and Android, which gives its users one less reason to stick with Apple. So for Apple, this isn't about music. It's about selling hardware. And Apple has deep ties to the music industry. iTunes rescued the business from piracy, giving it a way to earn money from digital music. Now, iTunes is the music industry's single biggest revenue generator. No one in music wants to jeopardize this relationship. X starts to see the hidden hand of Jobs working against him everywhere. One time, he gets a call from an unknown number. Instead of talking, the caller just breathes on the line. Ek convinces himself that the caller was Jobs trying to psych him out. But it's not all in his head. Jobs is leaning on the record labels. He reportedly drops hints to label executives that they could lose Apple's marketing support if they help Spotify. He also tells them Spotify will be bad for music. iTunes pays rights holders nearly 70 cents from every song sold. Spotify averages less than half a cent per stream. Spotify user would need to stream a track more than 130 times to match the value of a single purchase on iTunes. Some music executives tell Apple to counter Spotify by launching its own streaming service. But Jobs refuses to listen. He tells them people want to own their music, not rent it. Then, in February 2011, Apple announces a change to its App Store's rules, one that will allow it to take 30% of every subscription sold within iOS apps. The policy isn't targeted at Spotify specifically, but it hits hard all the same. Spotify is losing too much money to absorb Apple's new charge. But it doesn't want to charge Apple users more. So instead, it removes the ability to subscribe via its iOS app. Now only those who subscribe through Spotify's website can use the app. But since Apple bans app makers from telling users about external payment options, many never realize how to sign up. This all threatens to slow Spotify's subscriber growth, which makes a U.S. launch even more urgent. Spotify doesn't expect to make a profit for years, so it survives by convincing investors to keep putting in more money. But they'll only do that if Spotify keeps growing fast. If growth slows, investors will lose faith, stop investing, and Spotify will run out of cash. A U.S. launch is the surest way to keep the growth coming. So now, it's America or bust. Spotify redoubles its efforts to woo the labels by offering more concessions. It agrees to put limits on how often free users can stream the same song, offers discounted stock options, and throws in millions of dollars of advertising inventory. Spotify gets some wins, including more time to pay the labels, which helps its cash flow. But mostly, it's a steady surrendering of ground in the hope of some breakthrough. In January 2011, that breakthrough finally comes. Sony Music agrees to license its music to Spotify in the U.S. Universal and EMI follow soon after. Well, check out the shift here. With EMI, Sony and Universal signed up, Warner Music is now the only holdout. Earlier, Spotify was the one sweating in Rockefeller Plaza. Now, not so much. In multi-party negotiations, momentum can step in as part of your strategy. Once most players commit, those who don't risk being isolated. Now, sometimes you don't win by overpowering the toughest negotiator. You just make them the last ones left outside the tent. It's summer 2011, and the Spotify team is back at Warner Music's offices in Rockefeller Plaza. But Warner's executives are still playing hardball. Opposition is unchanged. As long as the free tier exists, you'll never have Warner Music on Spotify in the U.S. Spotify lead negotiator Ken Parks knows Spotify will be weaker without Warner Music artists like Bruno Mars, Lincoln Park, and Lady Annabellum. But now that the other three major labels have signed up, the dynamics changed. Parks closes his notebook. Well, never is a very long time. Still, I can tell there's no point continuing this meeting, but I'll say this. Sony, Universal, and EMI are in. Spotify's gonna launch in the U.S. in early July. With or without you. Now, it's Warner Music's turn to sweat. If Spotify launches and does well without its artists, Spotify will have more leverage to push back against Warner's demands in the future. The current deal on the table just might be the best one they'll ever get. In result, Warner Music blinks and agrees to a deal with Spotify. With all four major labels finally on board, Spotify secures another hundred million dollars of investment at a valuation of one billion dollars. It's been five years since founding and three years since launching in Europe. And at last, Spotify is ready to take on America. It's July 2011, and after years of delays, Spotify's just landed in the U.S. The company launches with a catalog of 15 million songs and three monthly tiers, a free ad supported option offering up to 20 hours of music, unlimited desktop listening for five dollars a month or ten dollars a month for mobile access. To build buzz, Spotify reuses the manufactured scarcity trick that paid off in Europe and makes the free tier invite only. It hires music stars Shakira and 50 Cent to give away invitations on social media, while brands like Sprite and Motorola give away tens of thousands more. And existing Spotify users can invite their friends. But Spotify's promotional push is only getting started. Two months after launch, it announces that new users will need a Facebook account in order to register. It's part of a deal extruct with Mark Zuckerberg to gain access to Facebook's 800 million users. In return for this promotion, Spotify also agrees that its users listening choices will be shared online on Facebook. But there's a problem. Users didn't get that memo. They discovered that every song they listen to is being broadcast to the world only after it starts filling up their Facebook feed. There is an option to turn it off, but users need to find it within Spotify's settings. This invasion of privacy sparks such a big backlash and Spotify promises to add a private listening mode, although it won't be activated by default. The public sharing of music continues until Spotify's arrangement with Facebook ends a year later. Despite the outcry, the deal is a win for Spotify. Monthly usage soars 50% and tens of thousands of new users sign up every day. By the end of 2011, Spotify's user base has doubled in size. It now has around 15 million active users worldwide, including more than 4 million paying subscribers. But its losses are rising too. In 2012, it loses $78 million. And as Spotify grows, so do the number of competitors. It's January 2012 and in a conference room at the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas, the Beats Electronics Sportive Directors is meeting. But this isn't your typical roll call of stayed corporate executives. The man at the head of the table is CEO Jimmy Iovine, the record executive who signed Lady Gaga and Eminem. Next to him is Beats co-founder and hip hop legend Dr. Dre. And in front of them, ready to present is Trent Reznor of Nine-Inch Nails. The slide on the screen reads Project Daisy. That's the code name for Beats' plan to challenge Spotify by launching its own music streaming service. Reznor opens the pitch, aided by Ola Saars, a Swedish tech consultant. Iovine and Dr. Dre nod in approval as Reznor and Saars set out the vision. They cast Spotify as a robotic tech company building playlists driven by data and code. Beats will be the human alternative focused on human curated playlists, including ones put together by Beats affiliated artists like Well I Am and Gwen Stefani. Beats streaming service will be built for mobile and offer a feature called the sentence where users can generate playlists to match their mood by filling in four blanks in a sentence. It will be paid subscription only, which should mean higher payouts per stream than Spotify. By the end of the pitch, Dre is cheering and the whole room is buzzing. Spotify might be ahead right now, but it can be beaten. Music streaming is just getting started. But Iovine is already thinking of the end game. Because once Beats builds its streaming service, he's sure he can convince Apple to buy the company for billions. But as Beats develops its rival service, Spotify is facing a crisis. It's fall 2013 and in Spotify's New York offices, there's disturbing news from the data analytics team. Every summer Spotify's desktop listening dips as people spend more time outdoors. But usage normally rebounds in the fall. This year, that didn't happen. Instead of returning to their desktops, people just kept on using their smartphones. Spotify knew this transition was coming at some point, but the speed of change has caught the company completely off guard. And that's left Spotify's executive team with a problem. Spotify's app isn't built for this. It has no free tier, not least because music labels won't allow it. But now, if Spotify doesn't add a free tier to its app, it risks losing millions of users and its main pipeline for converting free listeners into higher value paying subscribers. The executives know the music labels object to a mobile free tier that lets people pick and choose the songs they listen to. So they propose a new idea. Making the apps free tier more like using an iPod shuffle. Free users can build playlists, but on mobile they'll only play on shuffle mode, and only when they have an online connection so ads can run. The labels sign off on this plan. Question is, will users accept it? Spotify's team digs into the data it collects on users and analyzes their behavior. And they uncover something surprising. Around 60% of subscribers already listen on shuffle. Surprised? Spotify sure was. In fact, this finding rewrote Spotify's self-image. The company thought it was serving obsessive music curators. Turns out, most people just want someone else to drive their choices. And that's an important lesson. Often the winners in business wars aren't those most loyal to their original assumptions. They're the ones willing to let customer behavior reshape their mission. Let me put it another way. When the data contradicts your story, don't cling to it. Lean into it. Because it's probably telling you something important. The data not only convinces Spotify to add the shuffle-only free tier to its app. It also changes the company's direction. It's new North Star is to use tech to make listening to music you love effortless. The future won't be handcrafted playlists. It'll be playlists built by machines. It's 2014 and in Palo Alto, California, Apple CEO Tim Cook is working late. He sits with a pair of headphones on and his iPhone in hand as he checks out music streaming apps. He repeatedly flips back and forth between various options, including Spotify and the newly launched Beats Music app. iTunes still rules digital music, but it's losing market share fast. That's partly because Amazon's music store is undercutting it on price, but it's also because millions of people are now choosing streaming. Apple is now behind the curve and Steve Jobs is the reason why. He may have died in 2011, but his legacy looms large over at Apple. Jobs always insisted that people want to own not rent music. The popularity of streaming apps proved him wrong, but Apple has been finding it hard to move on from the gospel of Steve. Cook wants to understand what distinguishes these streaming services. Their music catalogs are similar and their subscription fees are the same. They mostly look and function the same too. He keeps finding himself drawn to Beats. Why did it speak to him more than Spotify? And then he realizes it's the human touch. In a world of indistinguishable apps, the artist curated playlists on Beats are an important difference. It also occurs to Cook that Beats might be the shortcut to Apple's move into music streaming. He knows that's not the Apple way. Under Jobs, Apple shunned acquisitions in favor of building products itself, but Jobs isn't here anymore. In May 2014, Apple agrees to buy Beats for $3.5 billion. Apple can use its manufacturing expertise to make Beats' headphones business more profitable, and it will get a streaming platform to start fighting back against Spotify. Plus, Beats brings the star power of Dr. Dre for better and for worse. The day after Apple agrees to buy Beats before the acquisition is public, Dre celebrates at a studio and posts a video to Facebook announcing himself as Hip Hop's first billionaire. Oh, the Forbes list just changed. They came out like two weeks ago. They need to update the Forbes list. It just changed in a big way. Oh my! Oh my! The first billionaire in Hip Hop right here from the west coast. For a moment, it looks like Dre's breach of the confidentiality agreement will tank the deal. Instead, Cook uses it as an opportunity to knock Beats' price down by roughly $200 million. Dre doesn't become a billionaire, but he still pockets more than $600 million that year. And with the deal done, Apple is finally ready to get in the ring with Spotify. It's June 2015, and onstage in San Francisco, Cook and former Beats CEO Jimmy Iovine announced Apple Music, a new streaming service that will replace Beats' music. It'll cost $9.99 a month. Unlike Spotify, there will be no free option, but there will be a three-month free trial period, and it won't be limited to iOS devices either. It'll be available on Android and PCs too. In other words, Apple Music will be wherever Spotify is, and it will launch at the end of the month. Tim Cook just put Spotify on notice. Apple is coming to reassert its claim over the music business, and it's framing itself as the artist-friendly alternative to Spotify. But a few weeks later, with the launch just days away, Iovine wakes up to the news that Taylor Swift is on the war pad. If Apple doesn't defuse this crisis and quick, its carefully crafted image as the champion of artists could collapse before Apple Music even launches. Music Follow Business Wars on the Audible app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to all episodes of Business Wars ad-free by joining Audible. From Audible Originals, this is episode one of Spotify vs. Apple Music for Business Wars. A quick note about recreations you've been hearing. In most cases, we can't know exactly what was said. Those scenes are dramatizations, but they're based on research. If you'd like to read more, we recommend this Spotify play by Sven Carlson and Jonas Leonhufu, and after Steve by Tripp Mikkel. I'm your host David Brown. Tristan Donovan of Yellow Ant wrote and produced this story, Voice Acting by Chloe Elmore. Our senior producers are Jenny Bloom and Emily Frost. Karen Lowe is our producer emeritus. Our managing producer is Desi Blalock. Fact-checking by Gabrielle Drolet. Kyle Randall is our lead sound designer. Sound design by Josh Morales. Executive producer for Audible, Jenny Lauer Beckman, head of Creative Development at Audible, Kate Naven, head of Audible Originals North America, Marshall Louie, Chief Content Officer Rachel Giassa. Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals, LLC. Sound recording copyright 2026 by Audible Originals, LLC.
