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Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

newsroom.spotify.com

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Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#81

Post by rchaud »

gadders wrote: post #14

I 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.

> Video > audio

This is why they're now offering video and podcasts. They want to be valued the same way Netflix and YouTube are, and they can't do it with an audio-only offering.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#82

Post by MonkeyMalarky »

jerpint wrote: post #27
dataengineer56 wrote: post #15

The 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…

The most frustrating for me is the way the “offline” feature works. On my android, even though I had downloaded songs/podcasts/etc. I had to dig in settings and set it explicitly to offline mode to enable offline playback. Another grievance: I love music and podcasts and use Spotify for both. It would be great to have a podcast tab and a music tab. Instead, if you switch from one to the other, you’ll have to dig out…

The whole offline / no data experience is absolutely terrible if you live anywhere like Canada where mobile data rates are small and expensive. The #1 complaint I've heard about Spotify for years is "I set it to not download music on data then didn't notice I was listening to a new playlist and now I'm out of data till next month". Also taking public transit like a subway without cell service was a pain. Hold on, let me open the settings in advance and flip the offline switch so I can keep listening to music on my commute. Ugh.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#83

Post by MandieD »

dataengineer56 wrote: post #45
fleddr wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"How can such a simple concept (listen to music) get so many basics so wrong and have such glaring bugs?" Spotify internally has a model where they have a large number of small teams where each is responsible for only a tiny part of the experience. Possibly this leads to a lack of a coherent experience. The other factor may be the constant experimentation. Frankly, 20-30 year old media players were better. So what th…

The constant moving of the Netflix "currently watching" pane is a huge annoyance for me, especially because it looks the same as every other pane ("horror films", "British comedy" etc). My grandma can't figure it out, she needs to be able to press the same buttons every time she goes on the app and Netflix doesn't let her do that.

“She needs to be able to press the same buttons every time she goes on that app and [insert app name here] doesn’t let her do that” must sum up at least 90% of user problems.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#84

Post by skydhash »

erdaniels wrote: post #48

Unrelated but, does anyone have a good universal solution of what music you "like" or "own"? I want to move off of Spotify but I want to make sure all my music is playable from some platform or locally. A decade ago I moved off the good iTunes and foolishly lost my complete library of metadata of songs, so I want to avoid that again.

Scrobbles through Last.fm? But I don't think you can export directly from Spotify (maybe through playlist and one of the music transfer tools? I mostly use Spotify to listen through a recommended album. And ads bother me, so I switched to premium (It's 2.99 for me).

I have a local library of ALAC albums that I like. I used Syncthing to sync it to my home server, where there is a Plex installation (When I want to play via the ATV). And I convert to AAC 256kbps to my iPhone (Bluetooth is lossy anyway). More hassle than playing via Spotify, but the latter's UX is so bad that it's worth it. Also I have some excellent headphones (Hifiman Sundara and Sennheiser 6XX).

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#85

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

erdaniels wrote: post #48

Unrelated but, does anyone have a good universal solution of what music you "like" or "own"? I want to move off of Spotify but I want to make sure all my music is playable from some platform or locally. A decade ago I moved off the good iTunes and foolishly lost my complete library of metadata of songs, so I want to avoid that again.

When you say "own" what do you mean? CD's? Or some digital purchase?

I believe modern iTunes is DRM free so you can keep all your purchases safe that way. Alternatively Youtube Music allows you to upload all your local music so you can their service to stream it. I've bought things on iTunes and then uploaded them to Youtube Music.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#86

Post by zajio1am »

fleddr wrote: post #31
dataengineer56 wrote: post #15

The 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…

"How can such a simple concept (listen to music) get so many basics so wrong and have such glaring bugs?" Spotify internally has a model where they have a large number of small teams where each is responsible for only a tiny part of the experience. Possibly this leads to a lack of a coherent experience. The other factor may be the constant experimentation. Frankly, 20-30 year old media players were better. So what th…

> Frankly, 20-30 year old media players were better. So what the point of it all is...I have no idea.

I would say that Spotify does not compete with traditional media players, it competes with radio.

If i want to listen to my favorite songs, there is no reason to use Spotify for that. But if i want something different-but-similar and i do not really know what, because i am not very interested in music, then discoverability of new music by Spotify is game-changing.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#87

Post by danjac »

mrweasel wrote: post #23
Dave3of5 wrote: post #3

More doom and gloom. Last few years have been terrible.

There's still a ton of jobs out there, depending on where in the world you're able to work. They might not be as exciting, the companies aren't as well known, but they still pay fairly well and it's stable. I do feel bad for those who are losing their jobs, it's not their fault. Many of the companies currently firing people simply had too many employees to begin with. Daniel Elk even admits it: "I was too ambitious i…

What's weird is that all of these CEOs are saying the same thing: "I hired too many folks a couple years ago, welp, guess I was wrong".

You would think some companies hired too many, some hired too few, others more or less just stayed the same. Instead we're seeing this groupthink of these so-called geniuses of the industry moving this way and that like a flock of sheep.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#88

Post by jamil7 »

jerpint wrote: post #27
dataengineer56 wrote: post #15

The 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…

The most frustrating for me is the way the “offline” feature works. On my android, even though I had downloaded songs/podcasts/etc. I had to dig in settings and set it explicitly to offline mode to enable offline playback. Another grievance: I love music and podcasts and use Spotify for both. It would be great to have a podcast tab and a music tab. Instead, if you switch from one to the other, you’ll have to dig out…

Offline is also weird on iOS, you often have to turn on airplane mode to get it into its offline state reliably.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#89

Post by EastSmith »

silveroriole wrote: post #53
dataengineer56 wrote: post #15

The 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 ma…

WTF? I just checked all my private playlist are now public! WTF Spotify?!?

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#90

Post by mjburgess »

eigen-vector wrote: post #32

This is probably the least tactical message amongst all the companies that have laid off people. Ek's spent most of the time rambling about efficiency and organizational changes to leadership positions who'll be least affected by the layoffs. Then comes the layoff news. It's almost as if he's rectifying someone else's mistake and everyone getting laid off should be thankful about it. I wish CEOs read some of the emai…

It always helps to remember that people, generically, are idiots who don't mean to say what, literally, they say; have no idea how to say what they mean; and are otherwise just struggling to create an impression of being in control and knowing whats going on.

The first paragraph of this article reads this way to me: a person flinging around cliches because they've no idea what they're supposed to say, or how to say it.

This, indeed, may be more acute if the author is actually distressed.

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