Following news of incoming changes to Apple’s App Store that will benefit developers with a new subscription revenue split and paid search result ads, Spotify today outlined to The Verge why the improvements don’t address their issues with Apple’s policies.

Specifically, a Spotify representative noted the company’s inability to offer special deals to customers and lack of access to data into “why customers churn — or who even qualifies as a long-term subscriber.”

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Pandora announced today that it’s acquiring Rdio for $75 million with plans to integrate the competitive music streaming service’s technology into its own service pending the usual government approvals. expand full story

The big question mark over Apple Music has been how many customers would choose to try it out, and – crucially – how many of them would be willing to pay for the service once the free trial ended. Tim Cook answered both questions yesterday, revealing that the service currently has 15M subscribers, of whom 6.5M are paying customers.

There are still plenty of unknowns, of course. We don’t know the exact split between individual and family subscriptions (though family subs were around 18% back in August), and we don’t know how subscribers map out across the countries – both of which we’d need to know to accurately calculate how much Apple is earning from the service.

But if we do a back-of-an-envelope guesstimate and say that the split between solo and family accounts is around 80/20 and that the costlier countries like those in Europe cancel out the cheaper ones like India, then an average monthly subscription of $11 times 6.5M customers gives us $72M a month. Multiply that by 12 months, and we can get $858M Apple Music revenue per year. Given that this is all very rough and ready, let’s call it a billion dollars a year in round numbers …  expand full story

Just like app developers have the ability to sell subscriptions as in-app purchases in iOS apps and Newsstand, they will soon be able to offer the same auto-renewable content through in-app purchases in Mac App Store apps.

Mac apps on the latest releases of OS X already support non-subscription based in-app purchases. For example, items that are purchased once and automatically applied to a user’s account. Up until now, developers offering an auto-renewable or non-renewing subscription in their iOS apps couldn’t do the same in the Mac App Store equivalents. expand full story