Big Data? No antitrust problem for Apple/Shazam Lexology

Big Data has been a focus for DG Competition for the last few years. In particular, the Commission has been interested in mergers involving the acquisition of a company holding valuable data, even if it has low turnover (see here). Apple's $400 million acquisition of Shazam, approved by the Commission on 6 September 2018, falls squarely within this category. Shazam is a music recognition app. Consumers can use Shazam to record a clip of an unknown song playing in a bar or other public place – Shazam turns this into an audio fingerprint and matches this against its database containing the audio fingerprints for millions of songs in order to identify the song playing.