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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%

#51

Post by that_guy_iain »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #40

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 yea…

I would assume it's mostly optimisation and bug fixing. Improving their ability to read files globally, improving availability, etc.

Plus internal tools will probably be a major thing too.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#52

Post by dehrmann »

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"

That's not wrong, but they also hired-up for a new podcast business that wasn't as successful as they hoped.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#53

Post by carb »

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?

- Features have to keep being deprecated because once they degrade it's too hard to fix.

- Use is only up when measuring metrics like "we hit our peak user-seconds" which only measures short term usage spikes and not longer time-scale sustaining metrics.

- Lack of diversity of users, instability of ads performance, and a CEO making antisemitic and anti-Palestinian claims has led to advertisers pausing Twitter ads at a high rate. Valuation has dropped to $10s of Billions instead of $44B.

- Small bugs never get fixed (on Firefox mobile if I accidentally hit the "Views" button on a tweet, the pop-up modal is inescapable and breaks my back button and tab state, so I have to open Twitter in a new tab.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#54

Post by toboche »

ardit33 wrote: post #18
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

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.

Twitter doesn't have to pay the huge content fees as Spotify does.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#55

Post by hackernewds »

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.

their moat is exploiting the copyright system with monopolistic contracts with record labels

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#56

Post by epistasis »

danwee wrote: post #49
mvdtnz wrote: post #7

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

[flagged]

Because of money? Quite the opposite, the problem is that Spotify is not making enough money.

I think Rogan was paid a ridiculous amount of money due to fantasies of some executives, maybe influenced by bad politics or something.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#58

Post by epistasis »

baby wrote: post #28
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...

He’s a great podcaster.

Good enough to bring in $200M of revenue through subscriptions or ads?

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#59

Post by Roritharr »

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...

Would you say that about any other type of media/culture/art you dislike?

"I don't get why people like the Mona Lisa, the painting is neither original nor particularly well done"

Is just as much a subjective statement. JRE is, by most released figures the top interview podcast on the planet, his interviews regularly move Charts of third party media like Book Bestseller Lists and Music Charts.

There obviously is a huge audience and value there and I can only assume their agreement over 200M was based on some pretty solid math.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#60

Post by macrolime »

fooker wrote: post #13
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>They need a bigger cut. 17% will not have a big enough impact to its bottom line. What's stopping them from bigger cuts? We've seen that big SW products can run on lean teams(whatsapp, post-Musk Twitter) and we know many large tech companies are overloaded with way more workers than they need to run(Google), just because they could overhire when money was free. >Apple and Amazon will eventually eat Spotify given eno…

For anything other than American and maybe European music, YouTube Music is so much better nowadays wrt availability. YouTube Music has stellar quality of recommendations too. But Google could easily do a Google and sabotage the product at some point.

YouTube Music still only has a tiny fraction of the music available on YouTube.
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