The European Union approved Apple’s plan to acquire the music discovery app Shazam today, saying that it would not harm competition in the bloc.
The transaction is supposed to help iPhone in its competition against Spotify. For the ones who don’t know about it, Shazam identifies songs when a smartphone is pointed at an audio source.
“After thoroughly analyzing Shazam’s user and music data, we found that their acquisition by Apple would not reduce competition in the digital music streaming market,” said in a statement Margrethe Vestager, EU competition commissioner.
“Data is key in the digital economy. We must therefore carefully review transactions which lead to the acquisition of important sets of data, including potentially commercially sensitive ones,” she added.
The European Commission opened an investigation into the deal in April, emblematic of its recent worries that companies may buy a data-rich rival to mine it for information or drive others out of the market.
