Jesus fucking christ
Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%
51–60 of 495 posts
Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah we seem to have had hit our industry peak in November 2021.
Strange memories on this nervous night in Palo Alto. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle twenties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were ther…
Watched the Gimme Shelter documentary last night and it made me wonder if, when Thompson wrote that piece, he wasn't merely being allegorical. Perhaps he was also referencing the Altamonte Speedway which is North West of Vegas as the crow flies and where in a sense the 'sixties' came to a very definite end.
Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%
#53The Spotify app constantly frustrates me and I miss the old Google Play Music app. - I listened to 5 minutes of one episode of a podcast once, decided it wasn't for me and stopped, but ever since then I have an entire pane on my homepage dedicated to my apparent love for that podcast. - The first 4 sections of the homepage recommend me exactly the same things - I have the last 6 albums I listened to at the top, then…
I think the most amazing mistake Spotify made was that recently all private playlists suddenly became public, because they changed the meaning of private and public to introduce some weird third level of privacy. I now have no idea what the privacy settings do.
Second most amazing was when they made the scrollbar literally two pixels wide and therefore unusable.
It’s not even that these are huge errors but it just makes you wonder who drove those change and why? What on Earth are their teams up to when they’re prioritising those kinds of changes?
Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%
#54I got asked to do a survey when I opened the Spotify app last week. All the questions were of a "What would you do if this price rise happened?" and most of the varieties had the family plan going to £20.99. I don't know what they are smoking to think that they're worth more than a Netflix subscription. Video > audio. If they put the family plan price up I'll cancel it and use Prime Music or something.
Netflix has been doing the same thing by cracking down on sharing of accounts between family members not living in the same house, etc. I'd probably sooner cancel Netflix or Amazon Prime than Spotify. I've actually been thinking about that lately because they seem to be putting out less nice content lately.
I might just start subscription hopping for a while. Binge on a bunch of HBO things. Cancel that, move on to Prime, pay for a few months of Netflix, Apple TV, and so on. The issue is that none of them have enough quality content to keep me there permanently and they all have some content that is at least tempting. There are a couple of shows per year on each that I really enjoy and then just a lot of filler content that I don't really care as much about. I actually watch more free content on Youtube at this point then Netflix.
There are a few alternatives to Spotify. I'd say Prime Music is probably the least polished of them. AWS for all their success as a retailer just never figured out how to do decent UX. Prime video is pretty bad for example.
I've heard good things about Tidal and I kind of like their focus on artist revenue. But for now, I'm pretty happy with Spotify and the switching is not really worth the trouble to me. In terms of cost most of these things are pretty close together.
Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%
#55Another company turning off the peacocking and turning on the dominant business practices culture that makes them great to begin with.
Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%
#56I hope they fired their UX guy, at least the interface would stop its descent into hell (Cianide 1994)
I've never had an issue with Spotifys ux
Just a couple that hit me all the time:
- Click the play button. Nothing happens. Reload the page. Hit the play button. Nothing happens. Reload the page a second time. Hit the play button. With some delay, it finally starts to play.
- My own playlists are buried underneath their insane recommendations. Want to know which songs I'm most likely to want to listen to? A good place to start would be the ones I put on my playlist. I think their recommendation system was designed by an intern that trained a deep learning model on 6 observations. Then the intern left, and nobody knew how to fix it.
Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%
#57I hope they fired their UX guy, at least the interface would stop its descent into hell (Cianide 1994)
I've never had an issue with Spotifys ux
Have you ever tried to deal with playlists and queues? It's a nightmare. Way too easy to accidentally play a song rather than queue it up, and simple requests like "I'd like to queue up this song in the middle of this album/playlist" are too confusing. Run into issues constantly on road trips or at parties.
Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%
#58I got asked to do a survey when I opened the Spotify app last week. All the questions were of a "What would you do if this price rise happened?" and most of the varieties had the family plan going to £20.99. I don't know what they are smoking to think that they're worth more than a Netflix subscription. Video > audio. If they put the family plan price up I'll cancel it and use Prime Music or something.
> I don't know what they are smoking to think that they're worth more than a Netflix subscription
Don't worry, I am sure Netflix will put up their prices again.
Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Video > audio I get what you mean, but I wouldn't accept that as a universal truth. I spend considerably more time listening to music on Spotify than I do watching video on Netflix. The content I consume on Netflix may have cost more to produce, but the content I consume on Spotify gives me subjectively more value.
I agree with you - music keeps me entertained all day, it has far more value to me. But isn't there an argument to be made that the infrastructure requirements for video is huge compared to music? The requirements to store and stream enough 4k video all day every day to satisfy millions of users is monstrous and that has to factor into the cost. I wouldn't expect streaming audio to be nearly that costly.
The only reason music streaming is so cheap is because it's a commodity. There's several multi-billion dollar corporations all competing with largely identical products. There's not much else than price to compete on.
Video services compete on exclusive content, so they can make subjective value considerations around how valuable certain content is to certain groups.
Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%
#60I hope they fired their UX guy, at least the interface would stop its descent into hell (Cianide 1994)
I've never had an issue with Spotifys ux
I have a few problems. Spotify for me is about music and that’s it. Why can’t I remove podcasts or audiobooks? They are using too much of my screen to promote stuff they care about and I don’t.
Also, they really, really don’t want you to turn off in-app notifications. I’ve gone through the settings and turned off every single switch I can find and now instead of getting a notification for “band $x is playing in your city” I’m getting a notification that I have notifications disabled and so I’m missing out on all the stuff they want to promote. Occasionally they decide to turn notifications back on and I have to go through them again to find which ones they flipped.
We pay for the family plan and as soon as my kids are off of it, I’ll probably switch to something else.