The table below presents market shares of music streaming services in the U.S. as of June 2015. Suppose Google is considering an acquisition of Spotify and that you work in Google’s corporate development unit. Before expending much time and effort on the deal, your boss has asked you to evaluate whether a proposed acquisition of Spotify by Google is likely to be opposed by U.S. antitrust regulators. Your analysis must cover the factors typically evaluated by antitrust regulators in deciding on whether to oppose a proposed merger. For the purposes of this question, you should ignore complications from international operations of Google Music and Spotify as well as potential actions of antitrust regulators in other jurisdictions.
|
Company |
Market Share (%) |
|
Apple Music |
20.0 |
|
Spotify |
19.3 |
|
Pandora |
14.9 |
|
SoundCloud |
13.8 |
|
Google Play Music |
8.8 |
|
iHeartRadio |
8.0 |
|
Amazon Music |
5.1 |
|
Shazam |
4.3 |
|
Sirius XM |
3.1 |
|
TuneIn Radio |
2.7 |
The above industry explains perfect competitive market due to low HHI Index. However the proposed merger has high chances of clearance as the combined market share of Google and Spotify should be well within 30% market share which neither creates tacit collusion, monopolization, pruce rigging, attempt to throttle the market and hence has high chances of getting cleared.
The table below presents market shares of music streaming services in the U.S. as of June...