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Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

newsroom.spotify.com

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Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#31

Post by surgical_fire »

rob74 wrote: post #14

> Yet, considering the gap between our financial goal state and our current operational costs, I decided that a substantial action to rightsize our costs was the best option to accomplish our objectives. or, otherwise said: "we fired you to make our bottom line look nicer"

Er... There's nothing wrong with that. I mean, we do live in a world where businesses are supposed to be profitable. Companies hire and companies fire, that is part of the deal.

One thing is to have layoffs when you are raking in record profits. This doesn't seem to be the case. The text makes a decent enough case.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#32

Post by make3 »

rob74 wrote: post #14

> Yet, considering the gap between our financial goal state and our current operational costs, I decided that a substantial action to rightsize our costs was the best option to accomplish our objectives. or, otherwise said: "we fired you to make our bottom line look nicer"

? it's a normal capitalist corporation, what exactly did you expect

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#34

Post by epistasis »

robin_reala wrote: post #29
TapWaterBandit wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, what's the alternative? Some people have this weird attitude that businesses are not allowed to shrink/fail. Businesses can only ever go one direction and that is more headcount, otherwise give them govt bailout. Businesses need to be able to grow and shrink. Otherwise we just end up with "too big to fail".

I don’t think the complaint was in the action, but the horrible wording.

I'm not sure which of the wordings is supposed to be worse. They are both bad. But that is the nature of a company on the edge of survival.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#35

Post by bluescrn »

mvdtnz wrote: post #24
anon23432343 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was and still is a stupid decision to buy Joe Rogan. I don't get why people listen to him... He is not funny nor smart. It sometimes feels you get better value when watching morning tv shows...

I feel neither positively nor negatively about Rogan himself (I've never listened to him) but it was plainly a very stupid investment on Spotify's part. Anyone could have predicted (and most of us did) that only a fraction of his audience would follow him behind the paywall and removing him from mainstream free outlets would instantly diminish his cultural relevance.

‘Diminishing his cultural relevance’ may have been the goal.

Reducing his audience, censoring his most controversial past episodes and preventing certain conversations from happening in front of his large audience in future?

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#36

Post by mvdtnz »

baby wrote: post #27
mvdtnz wrote: post #7

I wonder how those losing their jobs feel about Spotify's reported $200 million investment in Joe Rogan now.

I feel like you’re implying something but I don’t get it.

To spell it out for you, $200 million could pay for well over 1,000 employee-years of salaries.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#37

Post by epistasis »

baby wrote: post #27
mvdtnz wrote: post #7

I wonder how those losing their jobs feel about Spotify's reported $200 million investment in Joe Rogan now.

I feel like you’re implying something but I don’t get it.

The implication I see is that the $200M was not worth it.

I don't know their financials, but it seems quite unlikely that a single podcast would be worth that valuation.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#38

Post by konschubert »

thiago_fm wrote: post #3

They need a bigger cut. 17% will not have a big enough impact to its bottom line. They need to have enough money to invest in other initiatives, as the business they are in is proven to be margin-thin. Apple and Amazon will eventually eat Spotify given enough time, if they don't find a moat to be built

Why do they need to invest?

They can also just keep being the most complete music streaming service.

That is a low margin business, but it’s a business, and you probably don’t need a lot of people to run it.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#39

Post by loandbehold »

mvdtnz wrote: post #7

I wonder how those losing their jobs feel about Spotify's reported $200 million investment in Joe Rogan now.

Joe Rogan brings in 10s millions of listeners. On the other hand it's not clear what value those employees who were let go brought. The software behind Spotify is pretty generic. Listening experience isn't much different between say Spotify,YouTube Music and Amazon Music. Software engineers might not want to hear it, but content is more important than software used to consume it. Book vs book's cover.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#40

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

I often wonder what kind of work actually happens at Spotify. Pretty much every major change to the software or api since I started using it has made the product worse.

Breaking libspotify, pointless UI redesigns, obvious, user-facing bugs that go unfixed for years. Removing features like play queue for long periods. There's metadata errors and even audio corruption in some albums that I actually reported to them years ago, never fixed.

As for new features, there may be more but the only one I noticed somewhat recently was the ability to view lyrics at least for some songs, and sometimes but not always synced to the music. But this was already an add-on for Spotify wayyy back in their original client, and then they axed add-on support! This feature was gone for years after that.

I'm legitimately curious at this point what people actually do at Spotify besides billing and accounting.

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