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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%

#121

Post by TwentyPosts »

anon23432343 wrote: post #112
jaymzcampbell wrote: post #99

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…

Were these blind tests?

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#122

Post by Maxion »

pdimitar wrote: post #113

But why do they have so many in the first place? 9000 employees. My gods. What are all these people doing?!

Clearly not working on the core functionality of the app - heh.

This seems to be some megatrend with the big tech companies. Hire on ~10k staff, ignore your core features, ???, profit.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#123

Post by steve1977 »

izacus wrote: post #119
pdimitar wrote: post #113

But why do they have so many in the first place? 9000 employees. My gods. What are all these people doing?!

Maintaining a large worldwide music/podcast delivery platform. What do you think they're doing?

Not OP, but I really don’t know why you would need that many people.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#124

Post by 1letterunixname »

ath3nd wrote: post #70
toboche wrote: post #65

I wonder what amount of money will be saved doing these layoffs and how that compares to the overall spending of the company, given that the content streaming rights are probably a huge (the largest?) expense for the business.

It's about appearing efficient to the investors and therefore bumping the stock price and giving a payout to the few big stockholdets, rather than real efficiency. They go through a round of this routinely now, it seems, the letter is more or less the same as what he sent during last year, only percentages of laid off are different. That new version that ChatGPT generated made it more fluffy than last time. If they w…

Yep. Business theater. It's about stepping on the necks of working people to suppress wages and "teach them a lesson" they probably won't learn.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#125

Post by pdimitar »

Maxion wrote: post #122
pdimitar wrote: post #113

But why do they have so many in the first place? 9000 employees. My gods. What are all these people doing?!

Clearly not working on the core functionality of the app - heh. This seems to be some megatrend with the big tech companies. Hire on ~10k staff, ignore your core features, ???, profit.

I mean, yeah. How many engineers do you need? 5-6 for the backend, 3-4 DevOps, maybe some more for the various frontends... say, 20?

I can't imagine the whole thing can't be done with between 30 to 50 engineers in total.

And everyone else, what do they do? Cold calls to the entire planet to go subscribe, or what? Also alright, some lawyers and "compliance" people, financiers, marketers,...

Don't know. I'd struggle to fill a roster of 200 people for Spotify.

> Clearly not working on the core functionality of the app - heh.

Sadly, yes. That they become so tone-deaf is something I'll never condone though I do understand why it's happening (or so I think: is it the gobs of money that make people comfortable and disconnected from the bread and butter of the company?)

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#126

Post by threeseed »

jamespo wrote: post #116
anon23432343 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

People also use Apple Music, Shopify etc on non-mobile devices as well as IEMs on mobile.

And for those lossless is a massive difference.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#127

Post by jamespo »

anon23432343 wrote: post #19
surgical_fire wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple and Amazon will eventually eat Spotify given enough time, if they don't find a moat to be built I doubt it. Apple is restricted to Apple devices. As for Amazon, the same argument could be made about Prime Video eating Netflix, and that never seemed to happen. On top of that, as far as I know, Spotify is profitable.

You can listen to apple music even via web interface and it has an android app and works on android tv and android auto. So pretty much everywhere.

Can't listen natively on my lametric time!

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#128

Post by sigilis »

pdimitar wrote: post #113

But why do they have so many in the first place? 9000 employees. My gods. What are all these people doing?!

In addition to the technical work of keeping the servers running and the infra reliable, there is probably a great deal of work getting content licensing deals, working on marketing, managing the whole edifice, and stuff like that. They need a huge number of content “suppliers” to get basically every song in every country. They undoubtedly have a large number of developers working on apps for every platform, keeping up with all that attendant complexity.

On top of that, the company wants to innovate and probably has teams working on hardware and whatnot.

Whether it’s efficient is not clear, but most people there probably work hard on their particular daily grind.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#130

Post by cupofjoakim »

badcppdev wrote: post #105
jaymzcampbell wrote: post #99

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 made a gamble that having some headline Podcasters would build the listener market. Podcasters release regularly and have a different potential for becoming viral compared to musicians so it's a valid commercial decision to make. Seems like their headline gambles didn't work but googling suggests that the podcast listener market increased 10% in the last year so I think they'll probably try again.

For what it's worth Spotify is the most popular podcast platform in the US, with 25% of the userbase: https://explodingtopics.com/blog/podcast-listeners#podcast-p...

I'd say that gamble in particular worked. Not so sure others will though, audio books feels like it will be a dud.

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