Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

If you have iOS, there's an app called SongShift. I think some features are paid, but I used it once a few years ago to transfer my Spotify library into Apple Music to try it out. It looks like it can also export to JSON too (that might be a paid feature?).

They say that “public” means what “private” used to mean, “added to profile” means what “public” used to mean, and “private” now means that people can’t see the playlist at all even if they have a link to it. But it’s completely unclear which setting controls whether someone can search for the playlist by name and find it. I found out about this public/private change because I somehow got a subscriber to a playlist I’d thought was completely private, so I’m sure the previously private playlists actually did become more public without my permission…

I've seen some good analyses lately showing spotify's business model just can't survive in the long run with the way things are going in the economy and the record companies are squeezing them while simultaneously maneuvering to own them/buy them over time. Apple/Amazon/Google are diversified giants that can seemingly get away with running things without a need to make as much money as Spotify/Tidal/Whatever which just do music/podcast streaming.

In the long run these services are all unsustainable and bad for music.. I sometimes wonder if the young people going back to vinyl is somewhat of a pushback on how lame the entire experience of using these streaming services can be.

Podcasts can do well and have done well for a very long time in a small business model with sponsors & product promotion.. throwing massive money at them has always seemed an odd choice.

I get needing to keep a company lean and that businesses operate to make money... But most of these recent layoffs really make me feel uneasy. Spotify is a little different because AFAIK they are still operating at a negative net income, but still let's take a look at this. They're going to let go 600 people.. that's maybe an annual 90 million in savings (150k salary). The company's revenue is about 9 billion with -39 million in net income. So while this move might take them into the positive net income, it's still only going to save them what? 0.1% of their revenue.

I realize it's much more complex than this, but I have been looking at it this way for nearly every recent headline/company and the savings are never really that significant. I'm not saying that people who don't contribute or people who are bad employees should be kept around forever because the company is healthy. I'm just observing the financial "cost" of these laid off employees compared against the companies revenue/net income.

Having been at a company that's doing layoffs and surviving multiple rounds of layoffs myself, the impact (in my opinion) on the remaining employees is quite significant. I have seen people constantly frustrated with losing team members, managers leaving once a few of their employees have left, good employees finding other employment, etc. I'm not sure what I would do in these companies positions, but it seems strange to just cut your workforce when the trend has been going up financially for your company. These types of layoffs just create negative, especially with the current state of the world. Are any of the board members taking a salary cut? Are any of the C level's taking a cut?

end rant, I need to get back to work so this doesn't happen to me.

> 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.

Relying on anything that is closed source, or worse, an online service, brings with it the eventual inevitability of losing everything. No product or company lasts forever.

For things that are ephemeral in interest (e.g. movies you only care to watch once), that's fine.

For things that you really like and want to have a strong guarantee you can enjoy them later, the only solution is open formats and have the data in your control.

For all the music (and a few handful movies) that I want to be able to enjoy forever, I keep them locally in a redundant backed up ZFS server. No corporate change of heart can ever take those away from me.