When Spotify announced its largest-ever round of layoffs in December, CEO Daniel Ek hailed a new age of efficiency at the streaming giant. But four months on, it seems he and his executives weren’t prepared for how tough filling in for 1,500 axed workers would be.
The music streamer enjoyed record quarterly profits of €168 million ($179 million) in the first three months of 2024, enjoying double-digit revenue growth to €3.6 billion ($3.8 billion) in the process.
However, the company failed to hit its guidance on profitability and monthly active user growth.
Edit: Thanks to @[email protected] for the paywall-free link: https://archive.ph/wdyDS
What’s Spotify?
Some kinda laundry thing?
/s
It’s an app for finding your dog.
Yeah it’s one of those color bleach pens you use to get coffee stains out, no source.
December 2023:
“Economic growth has slowed dramatically and capital has become more expensive. Spotify is not an exception to these realities,” Ek wrote in a letter to staff posted to the company’s website.
Today
The music streamer enjoyed record quarterly profits of €168 million ($179 million) in the first three months of 2024, enjoying double-digit revenue growth to €3.6 billion ($3.8 billion) in the process.
HAHAHA I’m so glad I was one of them customers that stopped subscribing right at that parabolic curve. Eat it you nasty Joe rogan loving Covid denying fucking dirtbags. you fucking deserve it.
Yup I canceled my sub when they went exclusive with Joe Rogan. I’m not spending a penny to support that douche canoe.
Same… not super proud of switching over to YTM but definitely better than throwing money at Joe Rogan through Spotify.
As with video streaming services, after a couple of great years during which I practically gave up self-hosted pirated content now I find myself going back to it as the servers enshitified beyond my tolerance… YTM is my last ditch attempt
We ended up buying a bluray player and buy movies from thrift stores because fuck the noise that is streaming services now.
Stop being so canoe-phobic. Canoe’s make for a great outdoor activity
No fuck canoes! Kayak superiority!
Why don’t you like Joe Rogan?
Well he is a vaccine skeptic for one. And perhaps I don’t hate Joe himself but his platform is full of misinformation that is taken at face value. He has guests on the show that people take as experts when they aren’t. His dude-bro audience takes what he says as gospel and just makes things worse.
What specific misinformation are you referring to?
Covid misinformation for example.
That’s an entire category, not what I meant by specific. What specific claims about covid were made on his show that you believe are false?
He took horse de-wormer.
Even if he can see it, hes not likely gonna fix it
Gasp - it’s almost like these jet setting CEOs just don’t know that much about their day to day operations. Maybe they should spend less time tongue fucking each other for being “captains of industry” and more time doing the actual job they are paid obscenely for. They are supposed to ensure the company is running properly, not just push up the stock price.
Actually that’s a really good point. Apart from any glaring ethical concerns one might have about this kind of thing, it’s not a terribly good way to run a business. Man do these folk ever like finding a nice new way to shoot themselves in the foot 🤦♂️
If you as a CEO who has been running a company, need to fire 1500 people, your resignation should follow that decision or at the very least a few of your c suite and management team need to be removed with them.
Talk about gross mismanagement.
I’d give a new CEO a pass on this tbh. But if you’ve been running the company so poorly that a sizeable chunk of your employees need to be fired youve failed at your job. You should go.
I’d give a new CEO a pass on this tbh
I wouldn’t. They should either be promoted from upper management and know better, or build their own company and know better. There’s no excuse to manage that many people without experience.
Evidence #4564734 that these CEOs are more figure heads and actual strategist and absolutely do not deserve the multi-million dollar packages they constantly give themselves
Couple things bug me about this.
He’s composing there are still support roles instead of roles exploring high impact opportunities. But does he know the value of those support roles on keeping other teams focused?
Tech is so shitty lately. Get people to build something for you with massive revenue per employee. Pre IPO? Dilute their shares for another round of investment cash. Post IPO? Just fire ‘em, declare its the year of efficiency, and maybe say it’s your fault but not accept any responsibility or pay reductions or reduced rewards.
Enshittification in action
gonna just go ahead and guess the shithead didn’t start carrying the pager after the layoffs.
Not as surprised as I was to learn they had 1500 people in the first place.
Oh, so that’s why app is getting shittier.
For real. I’ve been having issues with playlists loading correctly especially in Car mode. It made my likes unusable for a week.
Pay your employees! I know you can afford to fix issues.
What do 10,000 workers do at a company that’s primarily focused on a music streaming app?? I guess it just adds up, but I cannot wrap my head around that many people working on mainly 1 project. Are there just a bunch of behind the scenes projectswI don’t know about? Like what are they all doing 😂
Edit: I think my comment was taken as agreeing with laying off workers. I completely disagree with that! I’m genuinely just curious what they are all doing.
It takes a village to run a global highly available service for hundreds of millions of users.
WhatsApp was able to build this in a cave! With a box of scraps!
Hey at least this guy is asking, make him the CEO
I have finally stopped using Spotify.
Now using TIDAL and absolutely loving it. It’s like what Spotify used to be, loads of great recommendations, much better audio quality, a bit cheaper, and I believe the artists get a better cut.
It’s too good to last, but I’m going to enjoy it while it doesI saw Spotify sent out an email for another fee hike yesterday. When I opened the app, it was showing me some garbage for an AI playlist generator and the email mentioned they needed more money to pay for amazing new features, the new AI system was no better than the previous system so I figured wtf do they need it for.
After 15 years of being a paid member, I’m going to wrap it up and go back to piracy.
I’m on the same track although I distribute my music there, so I wonder if unsubbing will affect that. I’m not subbed to the other platforms that have my music, so I don’t see why it would.
Because they have a huge market share, though, it’s easier to tell people check me out on Spotify than Tidal/Deezer/Bandcamp or whatever because the average Joe doesn’t know what those are.
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Slsk /Winamp for life. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
I was in the Winamp to foobar pipeline in the 00s and I have zero ragrets
I still SLSK but mostly I OPH now.
Hello friend
I haven’t had any issues, but maybe I’m too mainstream
If i wasn’t getting spotify premium for free then I’d seriously look into getting Tidal.
Just took a look at their pricing. Immediately comparable with Spotify (same price for both individual and family). Looks like I’m trying a new streaming service!
Don’t forget there are services around that will copy your playlists from one service to another.
such as?
I’ve been using Tidal for a long time, and it has only gotten better.
They recently upgraded all tiers to high quality (better than CD) quality for free.
Meanwhile Spotify still doesn’t have the high quality audio tier they promised a few years ago.
Odd that it says $10.99 for individual plan on the website but $12.99 when you download the app.
I expect that’s due to the 30% cut taken on subscriptions purchased through the app store
It’s because when you buy it via the app store then the app store takes a cut
If that’s the argument, that’s not even the right price. It should be $15.70, because 15.70 - 30% = 10.99. They are losing money if they keep doing math wrong. Looks like they just put 30% above 10 (which isn’t 10.99 by the way) and ran with it.
Best of luck!
Switched to tidal as got fedup with Spotify shit app quality, constant breaking when usieng Android auto, and glitching out when playing between pc/android. Tidal is better but missing things. My wife loves alexa integration…so she sticking with Spotify. I am enjoying tidal though. It just works evey time. Its clear why it stops playinga song, and so on. I would rather miss featurs then use buggy product. Spotify is full of random featurs and crap but its buggier then ever…
One other stark difference is the qulaity of of mixes and radio stations tidal puts together…spotify plays same stuff on loop basically, i rarely got anything good thats new and not promoted artist…with tidal i get a huge mix of artists in mymixes and radios, both new and old stuff…its been better for discovery then Spotify.
I have been using and will continue to use Pandora. I pay five bucks a month for no commercials it continually sends me music that I like to listen to and I have had little to no problems with it since I first signed up. While currently everyone I know who uses Spotify does nothing but complain about how their playlists keep playing them stuff they don’t want or have previously disliked.
I dropped Spotify during that whole Joe Rogan thing but I had been a long time subscriber. I moved to Apple Music which is super buggy and has what appears to be zero interest in playing music I actually like. From your comment, I’ll give Tidal a shot.
I absolutely love Tidal as well. Was a long time Spotify subscriber, but their UI/UX decisions, especially for their desktop client, finally frustrated me enough to switch. Had almost no issues moving my playlists over, have a shuffle which actually shuffles, still have daily recommendation playlists, and my favorite part -patch notes; I know what’s happening and why. They actually listen to user feedback and make updates based on it.
frantically taking notes — anyone not Spotify
A portion of those is likely something in the vein of “So the ceiling is 1499 employees…Noted.”
How did you migrate your playlists?
When I signed up they had a very easy process which allowed migration of playlists. I believe it was a 3rd party utility/website which you could actually use to migrate playlists from and to any of the music streaming services.
Thank you!
Does Tidal let family members live at different addresses or do they restrict a family to one house?
Tidal has a family plan, 6 logins and not a care in the world where they are
Good to know, thanks!
I have no idea. Everyone else I know is on Spotify
I’ve been a spotify premium user for a long time. still pay $11/mo and it comes with Hulu for that price. i don’t like all the added bullshit they’ve put in like the ai dj or whatever, and i don’t like the “stations” but i don’t like those on ANY service as they all pretty much don’t play what i want them to, so i just make my own playlists and shuffle through those. don’t really give a fuck that they paid Joe Rogan, and i think it’s silly if you do. Like Apple doesn’t do shady shit with your money too? or youtube? or tidal? come on. gtfoh with that ignorant shit.
yeah maybe if this dumbass ran his own publishing house he would be making some fucking money.
Shitposting aside, publishing industries pull in literally billions a year. They’re the ones pushing music to spotify. Spotify makes almost no money, ever. Artists barely make money.
Spotify, if you’re reading this, god i hope not, let artists self publish.
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Spotify made almost 4 billion dollars last year. I wouldn’t call that no money. I agree with everything else though.
have you checked their historical profits? They’ve lost money on almost every year of their business operation. I don’t think they’ve made net money since being founded. Maybe recently.
Spotify’s revenues for 2023 grew 16% year over year, reaching 3.67 billion euros ($4.05 billion), as a surge in both monthly active users (up 23% to 602 million) and premium subscribers (up 15% to 236 million) beat expectations.
After a third quarter in which the streaming company turned a profit for the first time in a year, however, its operating loss was again in the red, at 75 million euros ($82.7 million), albeit better than its guidance; Spotify says that excluding one-time charges its operating profit would have been 68 million euros ($75 million), more than double the 32 million euros ($34 million) in profit it generated in the third quarter of 2023.
So 4 billion in revenue, only $75 million in profit.
These corpos love to pretend they’re not profitable to attract dumb money and VC fucks. Reddit somehow wasn’t profitable but managed to pay their C-suite to the tune of millions.
yeah and spotify isn’t profitable because of music publishers. Literally all they would have to do is start publishing in house. And they would pull in way more money.
VC does nothing but enshittify your platform, and fuck over creators/consumers.
I am somewhat happy I never joined spotify.
Seems like a monopoly that everyone belongs too. Yet they never really had the music I was after anyways.
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I’m pretty happy with Tidal
I still download MP3s
you monster! how dare you!
…download flac files instead!
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lossless audio - higher quality than mp3, though it’s arguable that few if any people could actually tell a difference between a high quality mp3 and a good flac version of the same audio
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Pandora usually plays the song I want anyway
It’s why I sub to YouTube premium. I can get any song to ever exist on there.
Yeah, as shitty as YouTube has been to their free users, YouTube music has had every song we’ve ever looked for.
They actually offer an inferior platform compared to other music streaming services. You can get way more stuff on SoundCloud for a similar price, or way better audio quality on Deezer or Amazon/Apple music, for a mark up. It’s honesty kindaastonishing just his popular Spotify is compared to what they offer…
what music don’t they have that you’re after??? i dont think i’ve ever NOT found something i was looking for on Spotify.
A lot of live music, a lot of indie music, and in some cases a lot of surprisingly popular music.
In the end, I never bought into any service. I am willing to donate to Soma FM for my work day music streaming, and for everything else I simply host it myself.
Anything specific?
I doubt they will return with anything specific or it will be something EXTREMELY niche, local band type stuff. Spotify has an extremely broad range of music. There are a few notable exceptions are Garth Brooks (where are the bodies Garth?!) and Neil Young.
Wouldn’t call them a monopoly, at least not for music as there are alternatives.
