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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%

#91

Post by twobitshifter »

survirtual wrote: post #28
mercwear wrote: post #13

12.184B in revenue for 2022 and they are still cutting headcount, another tech company who could not care less about it's employees.

They do it because they can. Because most employees are spineless and will fall in line. People making the money we make in the tech industry should be living well below their means, saving, and supplanting the tech giants with worker-owned coops and guilds. If all tech workers united into guilds the corps would come begging us for technical contributions, and we would collectively charge up the ass for it — and all…

A union would force these layoffs to be justified well beyond what we see in these PR releases, however, the severance packages offered are very good for non-unionized labor. It makes me suspect that the loose association of programmers has latent power even if it’s not in a guild or union.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#92

Post by ghaff »

halgir wrote: post #21
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 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.

If streaming got too expensive, I'd just buy more music now and then. I managed fine before streaming and I'd manage without it. But then I have a big library.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#93

Post by jzb »

I dunno, maybe if Spotify wasn't spending hundreds of million on podcast deals and actually focusing on what its users want, they wouldn't need to lay people off.

Any way you slice it, there's no way that the Rogan deal pays for itself. Spotify is stingy AF with the artists that drove people to the service, and then firehoses Rogan with cash and tries to shove podcasts down people's throats. I was a happy Spotify subscriber for a long time but they just kept making the service worse while ratcheting up prices.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#94

Post by disruptiveink »

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…

Don't forget the part that you now have to "love" a song or an album in order to download it because there's no "Add to Library" anymore, completely ruining the concept of "likes". How would I know if I like something or not if I have to say I "love" it in order to download it so I can listen to it later? Do I really "love" every single song of an album or was I just forced to say so in order to download the whole album? There is no possible way you're getting the correct data points out of me like this.

There's three things I want out of Spotify:

* Browse the albums of a particular artist and play it – this is becoming harder and harder;

* Find and play one song in particular by title – this is the only thing Spotify still does right;

* Download an album / playlist and be able to listen to it later on regardless of my internet connection status – besides the requirement to "love" it stupidity, the UI just hangs until it timeouts if you have a spotty connection. If you have the content, just display and play it! It's actually slightly better now when you have no connection, a while ago, if you were on a plane in Airplane Mode, it would hang for a few seconds "loading" until it gave up and displayed the album art it had downloaded - why?!

I just want Winamp with a search engine and a downloader built in. Is that really so hard? Is Electron really adding any value here, or just making problems far harder to solve than they should be across every single platform?

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#97

Post by halgir »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #54
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.

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 Pr…

> I might just start subscription hopping for a while.

Aren't you worried about how this will look on your resume?

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#98

Post by nivenkos »

jzb wrote: post #93

I dunno, maybe if Spotify wasn't spending hundreds of million on podcast deals and actually focusing on what its users want, they wouldn't need to lay people off. Any way you slice it, there's no way that the Rogan deal pays for itself. Spotify is stingy AF with the artists that drove people to the service, and then firehoses Rogan with cash and tries to shove podcasts down people's throats. I was a happy Spotify sub…

But Spotify doesn't pay the artists directly, the deals are with the record companies.

The real issue here seems to be over-hiring and a lot of acquisitions for all sorts of marginal stuff like video podcasts, audiobooks, etc.

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