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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%

#151

Post by chewz »

pembrook wrote: post #71
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

Before trialing the iTunes franken-nightmare that is Apple Music, I would have probably agreed with you. However, after that experience, I'm starting to think there's no way in hell a massive multi-product conglomerate like Apple/Amazon is going to overtake a single-product music streamer like Spotify. Apple/Amazon are clearly stretched too thin, and in a worse strategic position on audio due to the way the licensing…

> However, after that experience, I'm starting to think there's no way in hell a massive multi-product conglomerate like Apple/Amazon is going to overtake a single-product music streamer like Spotify.

Amazon Music Unlimited is very neat experience compared to Spotify... Good catalogue (for me), better music quality and it's app is just plain, boring music player not something neurotic like Spotify...

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#152

Post by vharish »

rapsey wrote: post #89
epistasis wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Rogan was not making that much less on youtube. Keep in mind pre-spotify he was literally making NFL numbers for listeners+viewers per episode.

I don't think he's that popular anymore.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#153

Post by matthewmacleod »

pdimitar wrote: post #125
Maxion wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is difficult to understand if this is satire or not.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#154

Post by objclxt »

pdimitar wrote: post #132
lijok wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are all these people doing?! Ensuring Spotify can smoothly operate globally

I can accept that... if it's said how exactly.

> I can accept that... if it's said how exactly.

You are assuming that Spotify is just the consumer facing app, but it's not. It's far more.

You've got all the bits of Spotify you don't see. Like:

* Apps and interfaces for labels to ingest their music

* Reporting and billing so all those labels get paid

* An ad platform to service free-tier users

* Embedded systems. Did you know Spotify has a commercial hardware division to integrate Spotify onto smart speakers and devices?

The surface is huge.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#155

Post by happytiger »

sigilis wrote: post #128
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…

Maybe. But for perspective it’s approximately 1/40th of the number of people that were employed at the peak of the Apollo moon landing missions (400,000 people) and that required the support of over 20,000 firms and universities.

It’s a LOT of humans for streaming music service.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#156

Post by bottled_poe »

n_ary wrote: post #131
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?!

> 9000 employees. My gods. These are probably not all devs/engineers. Usually, selling services/products in multiple countries mean, dedicated legal, HR, accounting replicated in nearly every location where no common treaty exists, and management in large tech tends to have too many levels and adds up quickly as well.

“probably”? I mean, yes it’s a tech company, but it’s a bit surprising anyone would expect it to be much more than 50% engineering. Marketing and customer support alone would have a huge headcount - and given the impact AI tech is having on those areas, I wouldn’t be surprised if they represented a disproportionate fraction of the layoffs.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#157

Post by stuartleigh »

snoopsnopp wrote: post #147
sigilis wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When I was junior I used to buy this explanation, but 9,000 developers is probably more then are actually working on huge projects like Linux or .NET it’s approx 100 times more developers then you’d ever reasonably hire. It’s just for financial reasons it’s cheap to double up of devs instead of giving raises

They don't have 9000 developers, they have 9000 staff.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#158

Post by dustedcodes »

I have never had Spotify and would like to understand what people like about it?

Admittedly I pay for YouTube Premium which comes with YouTube Music, so I use that for music. YouTube is kind of an integral part of life I find, everybody uses it. It has so much useful content, it has educational content, product reviews, how to guides, and then of course all the entertainment content. So assuming that probably most people subscribe to YouTube Premium, why Spotify as well?

Where do people have all that time for listening to all those podcasts which Spotify buys to lurk people onto their platform? I don't even have time for Netflix, let alone listening to some podcasts. Time taken up by my work, then my hobby projects, playing sports, playing with my child and spending time with my wife, meeting friends and family on our weekends, going outdoors with the kids or just for us to do something in the real world, cooking fresh food every day, doing regular house work and so forth, where is the time left to binge watch one Netflix series after another or to listen to these podcasts?

Even when I was single and didn't have wife and child I didn't have time for these things. In fact I had even less time because I did even more sports, went clubbing, house parties, dating women, going abroad with friends, etc. was even more time consuming than having a stable family now.

This is not criticism, but genuinely asking, do people who subscribe to those services do anything else in their life or are they just transitioning from Spotify to work to Netflix to bed to Spotify to work to Netflix to bed to... ???

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#159

Post by sdenton4 »

cupofjoakim wrote: post #130
badcppdev wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

25% market share is a bit lackluster, though?

Podcasting has also been called the slowest growing new medium in the history of new media. I can't imagine it's earning its keep, relative to those big initial payouts. Meanwhile, the shows that are brought into subscription-only world systematically fail to attract new listeners; it is hard to use podcast exclusives to grow market share. Especially the talking head variety, which exist in abundance outside the pay wall.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#160

Post by pdimitar »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #153
pdimitar wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It is difficult to understand if this is satire or not.

Why would it be a satire? I've worked on much harder problems than moving anywhere between 1MB to 20MB files from a CDN to user's devices, and we were 11 people, responsible for dozens of terabytes per workday.

Obviously I am not well-versed in all the legal requirements and many other commercial aspects, but to me 9000 is quite insane and surely can be optimized away.

And apparently Spotify agrees.

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