241–250 of 1001 posts
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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.
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> Spotify reported that it had 9,400 employees at the end of the third quarter of 2023. It had already cut back employee numbers by 6% in January and by a further 2% in June.
I wonder what they were all doing. Their special apps, like the iWatch, are below par and they are pretty much the last service that doesn't offer HQ audio. AI does most of the editorial playlist generation. What are nearly 10K people doing?
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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…
Spotify has a lot of front ends to manage, I think more than 20 would be required. Mobile (iOS, Android), web, vehicle native integrations (Tesla, Volvo, VW, BMW, Audi, Ford), gaming (Xbox, Switch, PS4, PS5), desktop (Mac, Windows, Linux, Chromebook) and voice assistants (Alexa, Google). Maintaining that variety of front ends must be very labour intensive.
A lot of the external frontends are also not made by spotify themselves, but implemented by the manufacturer through Spotify's SDK.
You still want a bunch of dedicated staff to support all that, but it's not as dramatic as it could be.
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It’s unfortunately common when financial end of year is around the same time. Announced now, people can at least try to scale back Christmas and NYE plans if necessary.
How many people will be getting told they're part of it? I would suspect this will be hanging over their heads as an unknown element. Is it even possible for HR to manage off-boarding 17% of the company within a month?
> Earlier today, CEO Daniel Ek shared the following note about the company’s organizational changes with all Spotify employees.
> ...
> you will receive a calendar invite within the next two hours from HR for a one-on-one conversation. These meetings will take place before the end of the day on Tuesday
Looks like Benn Jordan's analysis on how Spotify will fail is slowly starting to materialize: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDfNRWsMRsU
I'm a heavy user of spotify. Almost everyone I know uses it daily. I don't understand why they are not able to turn this much engagement into profit.
Why did this drop off the front page after a couple of mins? Loads of people seem interested. @dang ?
Looks like Benn Jordan's analysis on how Spotify will fail is slowly starting to materialize: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDfNRWsMRsU
I'm a heavy user of spotify. Almost everyone I know uses it daily. I don't understand why they are not able to turn this much engagement into profit.
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I didn't watch either, but judging from the comments, it's the usual story: they are completely beholden to record companies, who own rights to nearly all of their catalog. Thus most of their revenue goes straight back out the door as royalties. Moreover, the recording companies can raise the rates pretty much at-will, which apparently they have done upon seeing Spotify starting to make a bit more money. That is why…
I'm surprised Spotify wouldn't take this to the next step and, borrowing a page from the old industrialists, try to vertically integrate and start their own music label and talent scouting arm. You would think they could pull a "Netflix and House of Cards" to use all of their play data to find exactly which kind of niche singer/songwriter people would want to hear. They could then use their reach + algorithms to floa…
Probably because music is spread quite far and the labels have a tight grip on the industry. If you want to have the music most people listen to, you need to have the top talent. Also, music is not as fungible as music is - if Spotify is lacking popular music, people are going to be discontent, use less playlists and use Spotify less in return.
> You would think they could pull a "Netflix and House of Cards" to use all of their play data to find exactly which kind of niche singer/songwriter people would want to hear.
I'm not sure this is working that well for Netflix. It has lot of pressure with competing streaming services that market their exclusives and their library is pretty lacking, compared to a few years ago.
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I wonder what they were all doing. Their special apps, like the iWatch, are below par and they are pretty much the last service that doesn't offer HQ audio. AI does most of the editorial playlist generation. What are nearly 10K people doing?
yea seriosuly.. they're desktop app is electron. its not like their individual apps are getting special attention. imho, I'd pay extra for a good NATIVE spotify client for the mac
AFAIK, it's not actually Electron, but their own tooling using Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). Also AFAIK, they came up with their solution for this before Electron was even a thing (so before Atom the code editor, which Electron came from).