At an average yearly cost of $125000 per employee they could either cut 1600 employees or not fund some random podcaster.
Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
341–350 of 1001 posts
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#342Reminds me of: "Nobody ever got fired for buying cloud". Spotify was a stand-out, almost no large tech company bought into cloud like they did, and everyone said the same thing: "It's not our core competence, it would require more people". I get it, it's not sexy at all to deal in infrastructure, but I've seen their cloud bill and it's significantly higher than 1,600 peoples jobs, even with the discounts they got thr…
It's actually non-trivial to run an efficient cost center department that actually supports other departments properly. The incentive structures are just horribly difficult to align. Cloud's selling point is that you won't have to spend 6 months filling out forms to get a single out of date VM (yes, that happened to me).
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#343Reminds me of: "Nobody ever got fired for buying cloud". Spotify was a stand-out, almost no large tech company bought into cloud like they did, and everyone said the same thing: "It's not our core competence, it would require more people". I get it, it's not sexy at all to deal in infrastructure, but I've seen their cloud bill and it's significantly higher than 1,600 peoples jobs, even with the discounts they got thr…
Finding people who can run infra at Spotify scale isn’t easy. Even if they could find those people, it tough to leave aws (by design). They could’ve been more careful about avoiding lock-in by building more on something like kube but most startups don’t have that foresight, and the expense of moving to on-prem is compounded even more when they have so much wrapped up in the aws ecosystem.
TikTok found all of those people very quickly, they famously don't use a public cloud provider. Infra isn't magic.
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where in the article did you see cloud costs being the reason for this layoff? > Spotify is cutting almost 1,600 jobs as the music streaming service blamed a slowing economy and higher borrowing costs in the latest round of redundancies at big tech companies. It clearly states later that in a zero interest environment Spotify borrowed heavily and over hired, in this environment it’s no longer sustainable and they had…
Cost's don't exist in a vacuum. it's easier to lay people off than to save millions in cloud spending when you've already committed to $x-billion over 5 years.
A single engineer is 400k in total costs, and they hired thousands for initiatives that didn’t pan out. Thinking cloud costs come anywhere close to being a factor here is nonsense and not supported by anything in the article.
You extrapolated that costs meant cloud costs vs. them overhiring during the pandemic and investing in things like podcasts, which haven’t had the expected returns. You did this in an attempt to tie this back to some injustice that happened to you in a comment section far far away, which you’ve edited the post to remove now, thankfully.
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#345Can someone explain to me why a company that is about streaming mp3s needs 9500 employees? That just sounds extremely inefficient to me. They don't even have native desktop apps.
Well, this is another version of the classic "I could build this in an weekend" trope. 9500 is probably excessive, but think of it just this way: 1. Spotify has a worldwide presence, apparently 184 markets; that probably entails a legal presence in many of those jurisdictions, sales, marketing, support, localization, etc.; at a conservative 2 persons per market, just that's going to generate about 400 jobs; now, most…
Spotify does awesome music recommendation - there are no human curation involved like with Apple Music afaik - you probably need a whole bunch of people for this.
They do much more than merely streaming mp3's and they working on a video product as well - there is some content creation as well i.e agents , sales , marketing and producers.
You can probably can compare them to Netflix (12,800).
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#346Reminds me of: "Nobody ever got fired for buying cloud". Spotify was a stand-out, almost no large tech company bought into cloud like they did, and everyone said the same thing: "It's not our core competence, it would require more people". I get it, it's not sexy at all to deal in infrastructure, but I've seen their cloud bill and it's significantly higher than 1,600 peoples jobs, even with the discounts they got thr…
> Spotify was a stand-out, almost no large tech company bought into cloud like they did Isn't this what made Spotify success? Yes, they could have build their own datacenters, but someone else could outcompete them in the meantime. They have traded off something for another thing.
I think that's a good take, it's easy to look in hindsight and say that they made wrong choices but we wouldn't even be having the conversation had they not been at least somewhat successful.
The question becomes then: 9,500 employee's and none among them know how (or wanted) to regain enough costs to save 17% of the company from losing their job just before Christmas?
Certain features (spotify wrapped for example) would definitely be a lot harder with more traditional hosting. But the bulk of Spotify's workload are not significantly hampered by moving slower on infrastructure and recuperating significant costs.
It's just very easy to keep piling infra costs on top of infra costs and not thinking about it, especially if it feels disconnected from company financials for most developers and they do not see a line between spending and jobs.
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#347Instead of investing in massive podcaster deals, they should have just focused on integrating podcasts into the app in a sane way. I would pay more if it were as good as Pocket Casts, but it's nowhere close.
The whole point was to move into podcasts for exclusivity so they had something they could put behind a hard paywall to boost revenue - the music service will never be significantly profitable and will probably never be genuinely profitable at all, so they need to move into another area or they will eventually collapse.
Yea I understand that, but whats the point of that strategy if users don't want to even subscribe to podcasts in the app because how bad the UI is. It's like they've never used a podcast app before.
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#348Looks like Benn Jordan's analysis on how Spotify will fail is slowly starting to materialize: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDfNRWsMRsU
Would love a tl;dw. How does he predict the fail will materialize?
https://www.summarize.tech/www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDfNRWsMR...
For those against clicking:
00:00:00 - 00:15:00
The author of the video argues that Spotify will ultimately fail due to the high cost of membership, the fact that streaming services pay independent musicians less than traditional music platforms, and the company's neglect of its only asset - its artists.
00:00:00 The author of the video argues that Spotify will ultimately fail because of the high cost of membership and the fact that streaming services pay independent musicians less than traditional music platforms.
00:05:00 The author of the video makes the case that Spotify will eventually fail because of its business model, which relies on rapid growth and unsustainable levels of value in the music industry. He argues that if Spotify's independent musicians were paid more fairly, the platform would be unable to survive.
00:10:00 The author of the video argues that Spotify will eventually fail due to the company's neglect of its only asset - its artists. The author believes that this neglect will lead to the eventual collapse of the streaming music industry as a whole. However, he also believes that this collapse will be hastened by the fact that for-profit companies are required to eventually pay their investors as little as possible.
00:15:00 The author of this video argues that streaming services like Spotify will ultimately fail because they rely on artificial scarcity (i.e. the notion that there are not enough songs available to listen to on the platform). They suggest that instead of using streaming services, musicians should focus on releasing their music on their own platforms, such as Bandcamp or their own website.
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why I'm bullish about Oxide (who are building hardware to make it easy to essentially run your own cloud.) Nobody wants to deal with the nasty parts of running servers but if a company can take some of that complexity away, you could save a tonne of money over AWS.
How is running your own cloud different than traditional bare metal?
For one, you can use your compute resources much more elasticly. You can create and delete VMs on demand and don't need to drive to the colo to reimage.
Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
#350I 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 pe…
> So assuming that probably most people subscribe to YouTube Premium, why Spotify as well?
Because I don't listen to "educational content, product reviews, how to guides" all the time?
I listen to music, and at its core Spotify is still a music streaming service. And between discover weekly, dj, curated playlists, my own playlists and user-created playlists there are significantly more ways to find the music you want, and not the bullshit non-working search that Youtube has.