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Apple reportedly tried to keep Spotify out of U.S.

Spotify Director and former Facebook president Sean Parker said there was "some indication" of Apple attempting to block the music streaming service out of the U.S. fearing competition for iTunes.

Speaking at the D10 conference on Wednesday, Parker claims that there was a sense that Apple felt threatened by Spotify and may have taken steps to stop its launch in the U.S. where iTunes is the dominating music distribution entity.

“There was some indication that that might have been happening,” Parker said. “You hear things, people send you emails.”

Although onstage at the time, Spotify founder and CEO Daniel Ek didn't comment on why it took the service two and a half years after it launched in Europe to reach America. The app-based music streamer, created in 2006 in Sweden, was already gaining critical acclaim in a number of countries by 2010, but only hit U.S. shores in July 2011.

Parker admits that the music industry is not an overly important sector for Apple and it is unlikely that the company is too concerned with rivals like Spotify, saying "“[Music] is still such a small part of their overall business, it wouldn’t be hugely significant to their bottom line.”


Spotify Director Sean Parker at D10. | Source: All Things D

Before Parker's comments, Ek said that there are about 10 million Spotify users in the U.S., 3 million of which are paying customers. The service's catalog now boasts 18 million songs and the list is growing by 10,000 or 20,000 tracks per day.