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This is the best summary I could come up with:
Swedish music-streaming giant Spotify has announced it is cutting 17% of its workforce, about 1,500 jobs, as the company seeks to clamp down on costs.
Spotify employs about 9,000 people, and Mr Ek said “substantial action to rightsize our costs” was needed for the company to meet its objectives.
Mr Ek said that given the recent “positive” results, the job cuts being announced “will feel surprisingly large” for many people.
He said Spotify had considered making smaller reductions during 2024 and 2025, but decided that more drastic action was needed to improve the company’s finances.
Since it launched, Spotify has spent a lot of money on growing the business, and in securing exclusive content such as podcasts created by the likes of Michelle and Barack Obama as well as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
Commenting on podcast content, Mr Ek told the BBC in September: “The truth of the matter is some of it has worked, some of it hasn’t.”
The original article contains 302 words, the summary contains 161 words. Saved 47%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Fire the payola people that make it so even if you hit shuffle, you’ll only hear the same 10% of your playlist over and over again with the same artist 3 songs in a row.
They say that they can’t release their randomizer algorithm to protect trade secrets. Which is exactly what a company engaging in payola would say.
They could easily pay those workers by terminating the contract with Rogan
They also bought Michelle Obama and Duke&Duchess of Essex as podcasters. Not saying these are equivalent to Rogan, just that they seem to be burning money on things that has nothing to do with music. And I’m very much not a fan of fucking up podcasts as a simple medium delivered by RSS. I have a futile hope that that decision will burn them.
And I’m very much not a fan of fucking up podcasts as a simple medium delivered by RSS. I have a futile hope that that decision will burn them.
This was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. When they started locking up shows to their app, I cancelled my subscription and dropped Spotify entirely. I don’t even listen to any of the shows they bought but I do listen to a lot of podcasts through Pocket Casts and take umbrage when anybody fucks with the standards.
They’re investing heavily in podcasts because podcasts are far, far more profitable than music. If they can get people used to (and hooked) on listening to podcasts (any podcasts) through Spotify then all that money spent on popular podcasters will be worth it (in the end).
I’m sure Spotify would love it if they could stop streaming music entirely and just focus on podcasts. Streaming music costs them a ton of money and overhead (bureaucracy associated with keeping track of and paying artists globally with bazillions of laws and regulations and fees to navigate) whereas podcasts just cost bandwidth.
I hate that you’re right. I listen to 0 podcast, it’s just not my format, yet they constantly push it in my face
if it’s not available via RSS then it’s not a podcast, it’s an audio show.
Big tech used to be built on the idea that you could work on a moonshot idea, have it fail, and then be reassigned to something new, or swallowed into new orgs. This way, you could work on the next Zune, Fire Phone, or Circles, and not fear for your job - like you would if you worked for a startup.
Now, they don’t give a fuck. If the moonshot fails, they move the exec to a new org, and fire the entire team. It means that companies like Spotify can diversify their offering while saving money, and due to the poor hiring market and general apathy of tech workers, they just deal with it.
Uh… Ok… Wow. So you understand how businesses work?
I think Joe was out of things to say 10 years ago. You could replace him with AI and never know the difference.
The opposite. He never had anything to say, he was just a great interviewer.
The problem is he started believing he had something to say, and started talking over guests he disagrees with… The last one I watched the guest spoke for less than 2 minutes before Joe went on a 5+ minute rant about how he didn’t believe it. I can’t even remember what it was about, because the guy didn’t even get to lay out his argument
We got it Joe, you think the world is a magical place and have strong opinions on how humans should interact. Let the science man talk
Great 😃👍
The first quarter they are profitable ever: AXE THEM!
Oh, hey, look at that. I just axed Spotify to save myself money. Fuck Spotify.
I said, ‘fuck it, why not?’ when the whole joe rogan boycott happened. Have not missed Spotify one bit since.
What do you do for music instead?
I whystle
Tidal. I was able to easily import all my playlists.
thank goodness for (internet) radio
I use ViMusic, which I downloaded from F-droid
My mp3 collection is 2 weeks long.
In a lot of ways, this is where I’d like to be, but my mind hesitation to jump from Spotify (and comparable services) is the ability to discover new music across a crazy variety of genres. Especially since it’s stable and uses the same controls every time, I think I’d have a hard time leaving.
Big tech got me addicted like that.
That’s the only thing I don’t self host. I enjoy discovering new music from various genres. I reminisce of the days when you would ask someone to send you a track you just heard over Bluetooth to your Nokia.
Those are rookie numbers! Get back to me when your in the GB’s
Last I checked, when it says only a day long, it was 15 GB. It’s been a few years.
They mistyped. They meant Petabytes
Did you say pita bites? I could go for a gyro
Well I guess I did correct by switching to Tidal. From Apple Music. Until Tidal does the same, I guess.
Because of interest rates hikes, companies like Spotify have to focuses on more trivial matters like being profitable. 17% lay off seems like a lot. I wonder if they will go bankrupt?
They reported a 65m profit on the quarter before these layoffs. I don’t think they’re going bankrupt unless this last quarter has been a disaster for them.
Spotify’s issue isn’t unique. Fundamentally, given how much money the labels demand and how relatively low streaming subscription fees are, there’s simply not a ton of money around. Spotify has been unprofitable for most of the past few years. The fact of the matter is that people expect to be able to listen to essentially all music for a relatively cheap price, and labels expect to get most of that money. The specifics of the company don’t matter much. If Spotify dies, people will migrate to another platform, and the finances won’t be meaningfully different there. Maybe someone like Apple could afford to eat the losses or is actually big enough to tell the labels to pound sand, but otherwise, this is just kinda what the situation is.
If the workers of Spotify had been unionized then the CEO Daniel Ek wouldn’t have been able to fire 1500 people by sending them an email.
Maybe they could try not paying a fascist $200 million for his podcast. That would save some money right there.
Fuck Spotify and fuck Joe Rogan.
Maybe they could try not paying a fascist $200 million for his podcast. That would save some money right there.
Only if his podcast has fewer subscribers than generate $200M revenue
You can’t sub to podcasts on spotify like that. He just makes money on contract.
I meant for Spotify
As much as I dislike Rogan, he’s hardly a fascist. He’s just an idiot that agrees with anyone speaking confidently for more than 5 seconds.
an idiot that agrees with anyone speaking confidently for more than 5 seconds.
Isn’t that the bread and butter of Fascists? It is pretty much the hallmark of a Fascist movement to have a “confident speaker” to wow the masses.
Just as they announced their profitable quarter.
This isn’t to “Save costs”. It’s to further boost profits at any measure, which is what publically traded companies want. Happy investors.
Do they rehire after the investors meeting?
Rarely. They’ll hire for some teams, but the roles were eliminated to directly reduce their headcount.
Companies want a revolving door of talent, but they also want fewer people…
profit has been tasted, now unfettered greed takes over
I’ve been in tech for a while, I can’t tell how much of this is due to over hiring and over paying for work during that crazy time 2 years ago. I had lots of friends bounce to hire paying jobs and a lot of folks were just trying to gobble up talent. A lot of those places doing that seemed to be having big lay offs in the years following. I think there was a lot of optimism back the about the market, and it seems like course correction and pessimistic outlooks at play.
On top of that, moneys tight right now. Saw 3 months of spotify premium dangled for 10 bucks like a week or two ago and it just seemed desperate to me. Still haven’t come back tho, broke, and I feel for these employees.
Despite being a shit company, them and apple music, maybe youtube music are the only top alternatives. Yes I can easily pirate and have downloaded spotify music using Spotdl but I also listen to podcasts on there and I don’t want it to clutter up my newpipe or libretube feed.
Yea I’ll probably keep using them, and advocate for better pay / pay artists another way
This is what people mean where piracy is a service problem. It’s much more convenient to have nearly ALL the music available on each of the platforms.
I wonder if that’s the biggest reason people pirate movies and TV, but pay for music and games. Not having to juggle where all the content is
Tidal seems to be a fine alternative.
Anyone knows why Spotify needed 9000 employees in the first place?
It doesn’t surprise me all that much, as someone that works for a big tech company.
A small number of that will be IC’s and managers that keep the services going, alongside people that create FOH stuff. Alongside that, they’ll likely have a lot of people in data storage, data science, perhaps even research science. Put these across multiple continents and timezones, and you’ve likely got a few thousand.
The majority after this are likely upper management, sales and account staff (you’d be shocked at how many of these exist in media tech), and internal teams. Again, put these around the world, maybe even more so, as some account staff will work with people in local markets, so you’ll have people in dozens of countries.
Operationally, they need nowhere near this amount, but if you want to achieve “growth” you need all the supporting stuff.
to make the worst UX bugged up PoS app in the entire play store
Seems to be a lot of competition there.
Yeah that is a huge number
Probably devs, updates, the verification and review process for music, reports. Apparently they also create playlists by hand.
The annoying ads also won’t create themselves. There’s a lot of effort being put into making them as annoying as possible actually.
Wow, i really need to stop using spotify. 9000 people somehow created the worst algorithm possible. I have 800 songs in my playlist and their “randomiser” is the worst thing i have ever seen. I accidentally added one stand up track and all their enhanced randomiser adds are comedy tracks. And not even new ones, it’s always the same ones. The app is dumb as hell. Click a odcast accidentally and never get rid of it from the home screen ever again. Instead of paying their artists or apparently workers, they aquire shit like joe rogan.
I’ve had nothing but trouble with the Spotify app.
it’s been draining battery like crazy for me recently. I’d listen to music for an hour in the morning, and in the afternoon it’d show up as the first or second position on battery stats with “10 hours in background”. it would also take its sweet time to load a playlist that I’ve downloaded for offline use when I was in a poor reception area, I assume because of the playlist “enhancing” or “smart shuffle”, even though I’ve had those disabled. I’ve decided to temporarily move over to Deezer until I use my subscription to rip my music library, and then go back to using a local music library as the lawd intended us to do.
Only reason I ever used it was because my ex had it at the time, after we broke up, I said good riddance.
And if you block the Facebook domains the app doesn’t work.
OK, fuck you Spotify.
Yeah, their smart random, or whatever they call it, is horrible. Thank God clicking it again removes the garbage it added to a playlist.
Each of those should be a team, not a 1k+ person department. A few tens of engineers for dev, the same for QA and DevOps, then maybe a few hundred employees for all the review processes, marketing, relationships with music labels&advertisers, etc.
Discord famously runs (ran) with 50-odd engineers. Silicon Valley’s VC-backed economy is famously terrible with over-highering by orders of magnitude, and since interest rates went up some of those companies realized that maybe they should stop burning so much money.
You have to keep in mind that they operate all over the world. Each country has its own labels and messy negotiations to do. Doing literally anything on a global scale takes a lot of people, no matter what it is, just to navigate the differing business environments.
So we should expect their legalese and marketing departments to be the heaviest staffed then, right?
Mind, I’m not disagreeing with you, you make a very good point. Licensing is arcanely complex, and it’s different for every country. Also makes sense to me that legal and marketing would be significantly impacted by all this.
Almost like you’d need a top level org for both legal and marketing (2 orgs) then sub organizations for each country/legal domain.
Seems like that could require quite a few people.
Edit: holy non-words, autoincorrect.
That’s my point. But not “9000 people” many people. That’s an ABSURD number, that’s almost certainly more people than there are record labels with nonstandard/custom contracts with spotify…
How do they have this many employees and an absolutely trash android app?
To be fair, even Apple Music and Tidal are trash on Android. And Apple is a $3 trillion company with over 150k employees.
It’s both amazing and annoying that Google is perfectly able to create useful apps for iOS (despite the huge limitations the OS imposes) but Apple can’t figure out how to make any Android app that isn’t utter crap with fewer restrictions imposed on them.
They want you to buy Apple.
I blamed my Subaru for a lot of my issues then i switched apps and amazingly every single issue went away.
My guess is for every 1 developer there’s 10 or more non technical administrative jobs. Most tech companies are grossly fat worth useless non productive employees that do very menial bureaucratic work. Think Office Space, but less neck ties.
A lot of these “auto-pilot” apps have thousands of people employed, I don’t get it. Like, what is there to work on once you have things working pretty well? If anything they just start ruining the product over time…
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In my experience it’s always new apps that ruin the existing experience.
Probably data-analysis/AI type stuff to track users and advertise “better,” making the backend more efficient to reduce costs, and adding support for new hardware. A lot of big, very profitable companies also have skunkworks-like projects for exploring new ideas and prototypes, most of which never make it into production.
Well, they have to make new, broken terrible features and then come fix them when people complain by basically putting it back to how it was.
Haha still, does that really require 9,000 people to do? Surely you can half-ass some new features with like a few hundred people?
Tbh most employees at a company this size become risk mitigation more than anything else. Once you’ve reached a certain level of success, you’re looking at what doesn’t move the needle as much as what makes it move positively. There could be a feature that is a major QoL improvement, but because in a test segment it performed 1% worse than base then it won’t be implemented.
Spotify, I believe, still works in the tribe and guild model that they created.
Chapter = people with the same skill set, squad = a group of people from different chapters focused on a single project, tribe = a group of squads focused on a large business goal, guild = a collective of folks who have a shared interest like Data Privacy.
Suffice to say, Agile is an imperfect tool and as you try to scale it, you need an increasing number of people to support it and make it run. Coders and Designers are likely just a fraction of their head count.
I’ve worked places that don’t have that support structure in place and they’ve stagnated for years struggling to get the most basic of decisions made. Decisions is what it is about too. Rarely do you get actual leadership from the c-level and especially from a CEO. So you end up with a lot of cooks trying to work out why the broth doesn’t taste quite right and lacking confidence to just add a bit of salt.
The app exists in its current state on purpose. The idea is not to give you a seamless and masterful listening experience. If it was, they wouldn’t compress tracks to 192kbps or less. The idea is to keep you trapped in their ecosystem and give you just enough value to not cancel your subscription.
