Fresh off telling an American court that songwriters don't deserve the streaming royalty increase they've just been granted, SPOTIFY is telling European authorities that APPLE doesn't deserve the 30 percent fee it charges on App Store purchases. Burning the legal candle at both ends, as it were. SLATE's APRIL GLASER: "Spotify’s position is that it would like to keep more money from subscriptions while denying more of it to artists." Ouch. And accurate. In a blog post explaining Spotify's complaint to the European Commission, in which it accuses Apple of anticompetitive practices, Spotify's DANIEL EK makes a cogent argument for how Apple is putting all of APPLE MUSIC's competitors at a competitive disadvantage with its App Store fees. Apps like Spotify don't have to run their payments through Apple, but if they don't, Apple imposes a variety of "technical and experience-limiting restrictions" on them, in Ek's words. Spotify doesn't use Apple for payments and lives with limitations on, for example, how it communicates with its own users. If Spotify did run subscription payments through Apple, it's conceivable, according to my back-of-the-napkin math, that Apple would make more money off Spotify's subscribers than it makes off its own. Which is weird. You'd complain, too. Content may be king, but every major streaming music company has virtually the same content, while Apple has cornered a huge piece of the distribution chain. Other App Store tenants may be inclined to cheer Spotify on in this fight, but the music community may not be so quick to join in, having been jolted by Spotify's moves in the US less than a week ago. Which is to say, content may choose to sit this fight out... Artists name-dropped in JOE HAGAN's VANITY FAIR profile of the man who will announce himself today as the roughly 27th Democrat to run for president: BOB DYLAN, the CLASH, NINA SIMONE, FUGAZI, RITES OF SPRING, AT THE DRIVE-IN, BIG STAR, GUIDED BY VOICES, there may be a few others. Rock and also roll. Both kinds of music, as it were. Positive spin: This is a man who knows his own taste, is comfortable with it and probably isn't shy about singing along loudly in his car with the windows down and the guitars blaring. This is most definitely not a focus-grouped music collection. Negative spin: I kind of wish—nope, not now. This is a house with music in it. The green light on the stereo is perpetually on. I'm not going to ask for anything more. (Also, per the 40th paragraph of the Vanity Fair piece, BETO O'ROURKE once pulled the equivalent of a THREATIN to get his own band a plum gig in San Francisco. It did not go well)... Unlike their acting, screenwriting and directing colleagues, film musicians have been left out of movie streaming residuals. They're seeking to change that in their next contract. But that's not the only fight the AMERICAN FEDERATION OF MUSICIANS has on its hands. Its pension fund is in dire straits, putting musicians' retirement income in danger, and musicians are hoping for Congressional intervention... TOWER RECORDS, which still exists in Japan, is opening a vinyl store-within-a-store. Perhaps it will stock this new reissue of the LIQUID SKY soundtrack, a passion project for my friend JASON ROTH... RIP MICHAEL GIELEN and EDDIE LAMBERT.