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 @Zerlyna@lemmy.world for the paywall-free link: https://archive.ph/wdyDS
What an incredible website. Use of page you go to read their privacy policy is blocked by the popup that requires you to accept their privacy policy before continuing to use their site.
I feel for whatever engineer exactly followed management/legal orders to create that.
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Ctrl-W
gonna just go ahead and guess the shithead didn’t start carrying the pager after the layoffs.
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
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
People keep trying to paint every CEO as this smart and hardworking class of people. We continue to see it isn’t true.
There are a lot of smart hardworking CEOs. But none of them ever seem to get to this level. At some line in the sand CEOs just become idiots playing chess (poorly) from their yachts.
Good leaders that care about their company seem to universally get pushed out at IPO.
Once a company is publicly traded it can easily pervert the incentives so that the goal of the CEO becomes to enrich the investors as quickly as possible even at the expense of long term benefit, because stock price and investor satisfaction become the factors contributing most to executive compensation. A CEO who doesn’t care about maximizing their own compensation in favor of employee welfare or company long term success doesn’t keep the support of investors for very long either.
Or they often leave on their own accord. Eg Steve Wozniak
well ya, the very nature of the shareholder system demands short term profits, the rug pull has become the industry norm, dismantle the company to make your numbers seem better, inflating value, and sell before it collapses, find your next
victim“investment opportunity” and repeatGood CEOs are bad for short term profits because they’re more interested in keeping their company alive longterm.
At that level of wealth, concepts such as meritocracy (if ever it’s a positive term) are meaningless; let us still tell the fairy tale that capitalism rewards the best of us and not the recommended.
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Daniel Ek founded the company. He got to where he’s at by having lots of money. He got that money to found Spotify by being hired into other companies which were acquired. You’re describing “Executive Vice Presidents” that were promoted from within.
You do have to be hard working to be CEO, there’s just a ton of stuff that needs to be handled around a company at all times. But they are not uniquely smarter or have better decision making skills than other people. A good CEO will understand that they don’t know everything and surround themselves with experts to help them with decision making instead of thinking they know better.
That’s not to say that workers aren’t necessarily equally as hard working, especially when your asshole CEO fires a ton of your coworkers and expects you to pick up the slack.
Who’s doing that? The only people doing that to the CEOs everyone else knows they’re useless.
People tend to hero worship others who don’t deserve to be.
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Not really because it’s not like they are handing that contract to him out of charity, they know he is a huge draw and so if they don’t keep him on, they lose subscribers (and not growing enough was the reason they gave for the layoffs, so losing subscribers because they lose Joe rogan would only exacerbate the reasons for the layoffs).
But I understand that this is about virtual signalling the safe opinion that you hate Joe rogan, and has nothing to do with critically thinking about this.
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Nothing about virtue signaling, you rogan dick sucking fanboy.
You’re level of critical thought is so low that you think recognizing that he is popular is the same as liking him. You can’t possibly imagine a non black and white world where someone would disagree with your mindless position, but at the same time not be a fan of rogan. I personally think the guy is a dope.
But, of course, your position is indefendible, so all you have is childish personal attacks…so.you took a shot in the dark as to what type of person I am…and missed embarrassingly.
Virtue signaling is so lame. I wonder if people even realize the cost they’re incurring to themselves when they always say the safe thing.
That title 😂 would make a good cross post for NotTheOnion
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.
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.
Stop being so canoe-phobic. Canoe’s make for a great outdoor activity
No fuck canoes! Kayak superiority!
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.
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.
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.
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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
I’m pretty happy with Tidal
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…
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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.
Wouldn’t call them a monopoly, at least not for music as there are alternatives.
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.
Not as surprised as I was to learn they had 1500 people in the first place.
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Even if he can see it, hes not likely gonna fix it
Oh, I wasn’t aware of that.
For the last couple of years I’ve been “flirting” with Spotify. It would offer me 3 months of premium for the price of one, I would take it and cancel immediately so I don’t forget.
Then lived the happy pirate life for six months or so, and Spotify would come in with the offer. Last time the price was higher but I said what the hell…
Now with this post I was about to uninstall, but I read some comments about services that transfer your playlists, so first things first :))
I’ve just used modded Spotify clients that give me premium for free for a long while now. Not sure if iPhones have an option like this, but there is an option on both Android and Windows.
That’s cool, I’m on Android and PC. But I don’t think I’ll go that way. I want to let Spotify die after these more than red flags.
Understandable, but I’ll be real, I don’t see it ever happening in our lifetime. Much like YouTube, nothing they do seems to cause them any meaningful backlash. The CEO could come over and personally shit in somebody’s food, and they would probably continue paying for premium.
Of course this is true. But I don’t think corporations die that way. More likely they will keep going with this culture, firing more/getting fewer employees, their product will get shittier and shitter, and more competition will fill the gaps, until they fight with one for the monopoly.
All this somewhere near the unsuspecting pirates 😅
Yes, but those modded clients still do not have 320 kbps streaming, I think since that is server sided. Plus, if someone wants to use 3rd party apps Spotify apps like ncspot, one needs a Premium subscription.
I just use YouTube. It has pretty much all the music I want and a lot more that I don’t.
I use YouTube too. But I’m not satisfied with the recommendation system - at all.
You don’t like being suggested a near Nazi level conservative “comedian” when you just wanted to listen to Taylor Swift?
i’ve just been using the “audio file” strategy for the last few years.
No fuss, no problems, only my idiocy and shenanigans cause problems. It’s great. Sometimes metadata is just bunk though, that’s kind of annoying.
