The European Commission [official website] on Thursday approved [press release] Apple’s purchase of Shazam, after their six-month long investigation proved the acquisition would not give the tech company an unfair advantage in the music streaming industry.

Shazam [website] is a UK-based music recognition app that listens to a song and relates information about the song and where to listen to it back to the user.

Shazam currently provides links to both Spotify and Apple Music, but antitrust regulators were concerned [NYT report] that Apple would deprive services like Spotify, Europe’s leading music-streaming service, of customers and reduce competition either by forcing Shazam to link only to Apple Music or using the application’s data to persuade people to exclusively use it.

European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager [official profile] stated that Apple’s purchase of Shazam would not hinder competition. The European Commission found that:

Access to Shazam’s data would not materially increase Apple’s ability to target music enthusiasts and any conduct aimed at making customers switch would only have a negligible impact. … The integration of Shazam’s and Apple’s datasets on user data would not confer a unique advantage to the merged entity in the markets on which it operates. Any concerns in that respect were dismissed because Shazam’s data is not unique and Apple’s competitors would still have the opportunity to access and use similar databases.

Apple’s acquisition of Shazam will not impede on competition in the European Economic Area [website] because companies that merge are expected to follow relevant data protection laws.