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Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

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Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#111

Should have fired 80% of their employees years ago when service was reasonably feature complete. Not that I don't sympathize with people getting laid off, but feels like past a certain point, more heads changes products faster than can be fixed, and sometimes moving fast degrades what shouldn't have been changed in the first place. NPR acquisition drama aside, pocketcast has like 25 employees that makes the service s…

What do you think the employees do?

I imagine there's a big team dedicated to getting inventory on the service through negotiations with music producers around the world. You'd need to keep them to continue expanding, adding newly produced music, and re-negotiating expiring deals.

There will be a large editorial team producing playlists, curation, tuning the algorithm with expertise, etc. That all needs to be localised and to cover lots of niche music tastes. That's also not evergreen content or work, it needs constant updates to remain relevant.

Then there's international expansion and enabling the tech to work for more countries, more languages, more payment methods, more types of music publishing.

Honestly, where do you get "80%"?

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#112

I wonder how much of this is led by the likes of paying $200 million to sign up Joe Rogan or $25 million for Harry and Megan. That's a big chunk of change. 9,000 employees too - 17% of the workforce out the door.

Spotify itself is not sustainable and going for the podcast crowed...

I still think it was not a smart move...

Its like that blue haired streamer going from twitch to what ever the msft clone of it was.

Yes Spotify is super popular but I hear more and more people moving away from it to for example apple music or other services.

They don't focus on the core anymore that much.

For example they are super late on the lossless audio train.

Yes you can hear a difference from spotify and apple music. I tested it with all my colleagues in the office. You can clearly hear that apple music or tidal sounds better then the spotify versions.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#116

I wonder how much of this is led by the likes of paying $200 million to sign up Joe Rogan or $25 million for Harry and Megan. That's a big chunk of change. 9,000 employees too - 17% of the workforce out the door.

Spotify itself is not sustainable and going for the podcast crowed... I still think it was not a smart move... Its like that blue haired streamer going from twitch to what ever the msft clone of it was. Yes Spotify is super popular but I hear more and more people moving away from it to for example apple music or other services. They don't focus on the core anymore that much. For example they are super late on the los…

how much difference does lossless make on the typical headphones in use with mobile devices?

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#117

I wonder how much of this is led by the likes of paying $200 million to sign up Joe Rogan or $25 million for Harry and Megan. That's a big chunk of change. 9,000 employees too - 17% of the workforce out the door.

The Joe Rogan experience definitely worked for Both Spotify and Joe

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#118

Super good time to announce layoffs, at the start of the month where everyone is preparing for time off and holidays.

Yep. Maximizing fuck-over of employees.

Tech workers need to stop working for corporations they don't own, aren't seeing the profits of, and who will just throw them away at any moment. The solution are businesses in the form of employee-owned co-ops and organized labor.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#120

Should have fired 80% of their employees years ago when service was reasonably feature complete. Not that I don't sympathize with people getting laid off, but feels like past a certain point, more heads changes products faster than can be fixed, and sometimes moving fast degrades what shouldn't have been changed in the first place. NPR acquisition drama aside, pocketcast has like 25 employees that makes the service s…

> Sometimes I don't understand how jumping from winamp to spotify goes from a handful to 10000 employees. Winamp + audiogalaxy (ah memories) probably covers 90% of spotify use case with probably 10 engineers, then just get some suckers to curate playlists for free.

The complexity is not the player, it's the whole business... Winamp didn't have recommendations, tack on another 100-200 people working on data to surface those. There are close to a 100 markets being offered content with licencing deals, each with different regulations.

There are internal platforms, infrastructure, development, each platform requires team(s) to maintain, and develop them.

What's the size of the largest tech company (with a single product) that you've worked at? Just so I know how to translate how larger organisations work to a worldview that you have experience with.

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