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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%

#401

Post by InCityDreams »

horns4lyfe wrote: post #111
ttrrooppeerr wrote: post #7

[flagged]

Just a quick glance at his podcast shows his last 5 guests: famous comedian, ancient civilization researcher, wildlife conservationist, UFC fighter. The horror! Please don’t venture out of whatever bubble you live in or you might find some podcasts there you REALLY disagree with, and you clearly don’t do well with that. I mean honestly, the guys not even a political commentator, just has opinions that are occasionall…

My bubble (not gp) is that i just can't stand jr podcasts - especially when interviewing people i make time for. Perhaps the bubble isn't the content but the presenter?

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#403

Post by shadowtree »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #297
shadowtree wrote: post #280

The core question is how many employees do you need run a stable internet business? Stable means no massive new product lines, growth, etc. Spotify is what it is. An app across a handful platforms, streaming infrastructure, and a legal/purchasing dept for music rights. Does this need 7000 people? Zero chance. Is it 1000? 700? 250? No ones knows yet, but everyone remembers WhatsApp at acquisition and watches Twitter t…

>legal/purchasing dept for music rights I would imagine this is where the majority of their staff are. Spotify’s catalog is huge, and record labels are constantly renegotiating extremely granular contracts with the streaming services (i.e. at the individual song level). For example, I’ve seen particular songs on albums disappear for a few weeks (the rest of the album can still be played), then mysteriously return (or…

Pretty sure the DRM process in YouTube is heavily automated - why wouldn't Spotify do the same? Give the labels an API, then they can dynamically maintain all that crap themselves.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#404

Post by pc86 »

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…

> 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.

Which is particularly surprising since they have multiple teams of highly compensated product people who are supposed to be guiding the overall product direction and preventing just that kind of incoherence.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#405

Post by mardifoufs »

woeirua wrote: post #164

This is an unpopular opinion, but history from the DotCom crash tells us that the layoffs are just getting started. Turns out you can’t run at a loss forever, and when the going gets rough the fastest way to increase profitability is to cut costs. Say what you will about Elon and Twitter, but he definitely proved that the majority of the engineers at Twitter were adding no value to the company. That is probably true…

This has absolutely nothing to do with the dotcom bubble. You can't seriously look at the balance sheets and revenue flows of tech corporations now and still think there is any comparison to be made with what happened 20 years ago.

Big tech generates insane amounts of money, which is why they have been pretty resilient to the massive fall in stock prices in early 2022 while still ending the year with a net increase in headcount.

Allusions to a pending "dotcom bubble burst 2.0" have also been common in every "downturn" since then and have never really materialized.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#406

Post by leokennis »

phamilton4 wrote: post #127

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 -3…

While I can’t speak to the numbers, in general I think companies that so casually abandon employees by immediately announcing layoffs when times are tough cannot expect any loyalty or flex from the people that remain in times the economy picks up again.

Maybe they’re fine with that, and it’s all good. But if you sack people on a whim don’t be surprised if they walk out on you on a whim if some better opportunity comes along.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#407

Post by GaryNumanVevo »

grey-area wrote: post #247
polygotdomain wrote: post #101

I think we've gotten into this weird spot where tech companies are almost goading each other into layoffs. I don't doubt that there was some overexpansion during COVID, but it seems to have shifted. Tech companies have signaled to the market that staffing numbers were too high (regardless of profitability), and that investors want to see them brought back down. These layoffs don't really seem to be an indication of c…

This is a bubble imploding, this is serious. The value of money has shifted for good after a decade of excess, there is rampant inflation and there is a recession incoming. These companies have seen the writing on the wall and are making the first of many layoffs to address this. This started last year and will last another year at least, possibly a few years. Apparently most eases of this sore are still in denial ab…

Okay but if that was true, these companies wouldn't also be issuing massive stock buybacks at the same time. It's normal ebb to someone with decades of time in the industry.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#408

Post by iancmceachern »

IMTDb wrote: post #396
dbingham wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of these companies laying people off are claiming that they "over hired" or "over extended" themselves during the pandemic and now they need to tighten their belts. Who made the decision to hire more workers than the company needed? Leadership. Who made the decisions to put the company in a position where it would need to lay people off? Leadership. Who bears the consequences of those decisions? It's not the peop…

A working agreement is a contract between two parties. Who made the decision to join a company that was seeing sudden, unsustainable growth ? Workers. Who made the decisions to place themselves in a position they maybe aren't that needed? Workers. Who enjoyed significant salary increase due to higher demand for their skills, increasing the cost of their labours while asking for increased benefits such as flexibility,…

These details are not often not apparent to workers, and many times the folks doing the hiring actively hide this kind of thing from applicants. So it is not the workers fault.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#409

Post by Kiro »

nsteel wrote: post #208
Kiro wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't tell mods to change something if you're not sure what you're talking about. Base here refers to people, 600 to be exact, so it sounds like you're wrong.

I think you've misunderstood the parent comment. They were saying the current title could be misinterpreted to mean "base salary is being reduced by 6%". I didn't think that, but I can see where they are coming from.

Ah, you're probably right and my comment is stupid in that context. I apologize.

Re: Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

#410

Post by nvarsj »

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…

After using plexamp for the last year, it just reinforced my impression that the UX of Spotify is cosmically bad. Plexamp feels a lot like winamp, it is a nice pared down experience that just works and is fast.

But I guess I'm just one data point. Spotify has enough users that they have no incentive to make any kind of radical change.

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