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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%

#41

Post by kevinmchugh »

mvdtnz wrote: post #7

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

Many of them probably came in during the same growth wave:

> In 2020 and 2021, we took advantage of the opportunity presented by lower-cost capital and invested significantly in team expansion, content enhancement, marketing, and new verticals

There's no details here about which teams are effected. I imagine there's many old hands who see this as the inevitable end of an unnecessary conquer-the-world attempt

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#42

Post by Shish2k »

anon23432343 wrote: post #16
mvdtnz wrote: post #7

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

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...

Are “it was a stupid decision to buy him” and “I don't get why people listen to him” supposed to be related statements? The business decision isn’t about your personal feelings, it’s about his objectively measurably enormous audience

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#43

Post by hackernewds »

surgical_fire wrote: post #31
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.

sure, but call a spade a spade instead of making the layoffs seem mandatory. there are inputs to financial goals - including executive greed.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#44

Post by i386 »

konschubert wrote: post #38
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.

Using Apple Music on a few Google devices now.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#45

Post by chii »

surgical_fire wrote: post #31
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.

> One thing is to have layoffs when you are raking in record profits.

if the future prospects of the business doesn't look great despite the current record profits, a layoff is also not a bad decision. There's no reason why an employee is kept if that employee's work is not going to generate future profits. Current profits are already generated from past work of said employee.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#46

Post by jamesblonde »

You will hear more about the new term "RIF" not - reduction in force. Nobody likes to say we had layoffs, so corporate speak will be - we did a RIF ...blah blah.

It's terrible, because i love playing guitar, and they are screwing with the english language as normal people use it.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#47

Post by hackernewds »

epistasis wrote: post #34
robin_reala wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Spotify is not merely surviving. They have numerous monopolistic exclusive contracts and paid $200M for Joe Rogan's podcast. Be the judge on whether that's worth 1500 employees keeping their job

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#48

Post by mvdtnz »

loandbehold wrote: post #39
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.

> Joe Rogan brings in 10s millions of listeners

Has this ever been confirmed by Spotify?

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#50

Post by epistasis »

rapsey wrote: post #26
ardit33 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

17% is a huge cut. More than that and you end up damaging operations. Look what is happening to X / Twitter. PS. Spotify had already two layoffs, once 6% in Jan 2023 and 2% in June. This combined seems like a 25% ish cut.

It's seeing more use than ever with a fraction of the staff?

Unless they can somehow turn "use" into money, more use does nothing to help X as a company. And the prior method of turning use into money, advertisements, has been dropping like a rock due to the inability of the company to keep ads away from toxic content no advertiser would ever want their ads near.

Can't cut costs to profitability if you are cutting revenue faster than costs.

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