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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%

#611

Post by fundatus »

dbrueck wrote: post #598
adamhp wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't work for and am not affiliated with Spotify in any way, but I can honestly say Spotify has added more value to my life than almost any other app I have downloaded. I have discovered so much music that I genuinely adore. It's honestly mind-boggling. I'm so excited to open up my Discover Weekly. I'm very grateful for the work that has gone into their curation of certain playlists and of the similarity scoring t…

I'm in both camps: Spotify is hands down the best ROI for me in terms of where my streaming dollars go. OTOH, it drives me crazy that customers like myself have been begging them for many years to add basic features like remembering my spot in a playlist.

> remembering my spot in a playlist

Can you elaborate? Seriously curious how that exactly would look like.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#612

Post by sparrowInHand »

jmarchello wrote: post #495

Anytime I see layoffs like this, All I hear is "We hired for the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal 'growth', But now reality has set in and we need our employees to serve a purpose beyond simply headcount". In my opinion they did these employees a disservice by hiring them in the first place. We need our companies to act more responsibly regardless of the price of capital. Innovate sure, but…

? If you are hired by a architect and a company is downsizing, its actually a recommendation. Your software works- it needs less people for maintenance then for growth. And at a company thats stagnating and going into survival mode- your skills will not be needed except for the last ditch pivots (which will be a architectural mess). Once more from the the top - to be let go in a software role from such a company, is a recommendation.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#613

Post by jzb »

slig wrote: post #485
jzb wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opposite for me. I cancelled because of that. Partially because I didn’t like Spotify endorsing his content, but also because I subscribed to Spotify for music , not podcasts. I wanted to see them invest more in features around music and work on better compensation for artists - not spend my subscription money on shoving podcast content at me.

I wonder why they force podcasts so much. I've never listened to them, and I'm sure they have that data, and the recommendations are way, way off anything I'd consider listening to.

If they produce the podcast they don't have to pay royalties + they've aimed for exclusivity with them. They aren't going to have exclusivity with most music, so podcasts are an opportunity to bring in a new audience and lock them in.

That's, AIUI, the theory. Whether it works in practice is another story.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#614

Post by pyrophane »

htrp wrote: post #425

>Severance pay: We will start with a baseline for all employees, with the average employee receiving approximately five months of severance. This will be calculated based on local notice period requirements and employee tenure. Is this a super vague way of saying we're letting go of the senior people with tenure first. The average severance being five months implies that most people being let go probably aren't the p…

I was surprised that the "average" is 5. It makes me wonder what that distribution looks like.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#615

Post by jebarker »

crazygringo wrote: post #596
jmarchello wrote: post #495

Anytime I see layoffs like this, All I hear is "We hired for the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal 'growth', But now reality has set in and we need our employees to serve a purpose beyond simply headcount". In my opinion they did these employees a disservice by hiring them in the first place. We need our companies to act more responsibly regardless of the price of capital. Innovate sure, but…

This is completely backwards. They didn't hire "for the sake of hiring" -- they hired specifically to build up their podcasting and audiobook efforts, which were totally new products within the app. Which they thought were essential to staying competitive -- e.g. what if people start moving over to Amazon instead with its Music+Wondery+Audible, or other competitors? Now it's turned out those bets haven't been as succ…

> Honestly, what do you expect Spotify to do?

Innovate to grow, if growth is the objective. For example, they could better serve the audiophile market with higher quality offerings. Not as much growth there though.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#616

Post by vkou »

potamic wrote: post #603
vkou wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Top blame is on middle-management (100+ reports), because they set the rules-in-practice for how the organization actually operates, and second blame goes to top management (C-level), because their job is to keep the middle-management in check. The line employees are just responding to the incentives that these two groups create, they aren't the ones steering the ship into the ground. Any significant layoff that does…

In what I've seen, this generally comes from top management, the board even in some cases. They set the agenda and approve budgets for everything the company does. Head count is a direct translation of this. In normal scenarios, head count becomes the bottleneck and limits how many things can be taken up for a given year. But during the pandemic, dollars became plenty and execs reached deeper into their wish list and…

> In what I've seen, this generally comes from top management, the board even in some cases. They set the agenda and approve budgets for everything the company does.

They do, but they are often blind, due to fog of war, of what actually happens in their firm.

Middle management controls that - by deciding on what kind of line-work (which they have visibility over) gets rewarded or prioritized. If the line engineers are spinning their wheels, doing architecture-astonaut nonsense for the sake of promotion, that's not because the CTO is rewarding it - it's because their 100-person director (who should at least vaguely know what each of their reports is doing this year) is.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#617

Post by fooker »

macrolime wrote: post #60
fooker wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For anything other than American and maybe European music, YouTube Music is so much better nowadays wrt availability. YouTube Music has stellar quality of recommendations too. But Google could easily do a Google and sabotage the product at some point.

YouTube Music still only has a tiny fraction of the music available on YouTube.

Everything in YouTube comes up when searched from YouTube Music.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#618

Post by hammock »

jmarchello wrote: post #495

Anytime I see layoffs like this, All I hear is "We hired for the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal 'growth', But now reality has set in and we need our employees to serve a purpose beyond simply headcount". In my opinion they did these employees a disservice by hiring them in the first place. We need our companies to act more responsibly regardless of the price of capital. Innovate sure, but…

>Anytime I see layoffs like this, All I hear is "We hired for the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal 'growth', But now reality has set in and we need our employees to serve a purpose beyond simply headcount".... In my opinion they did these employees a disservice by hiring them in the first place. We need our companies to act more responsibly regardless of the price of capital. Innovate sure, but don't fill up your tank when gas is cheap just to do doughnuts in the parking lot.

I struggle to understand comments like this one. Spotify were being responsible at the time. Their employees are not 30-year mortgages, they are volunteer employees given no promise of continued employment.

Through a few degrees of separation it all boils down to "we could do X when prime interest rates were 3%, and now they are 8% we can only afford Y"

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#619

Post by dom96 »

chinchilla2020 wrote: post #569
mlrtime wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is the issue. 10,000 employees vs bad user experience. Spotify has gotten worse for me as well, I pay for Spotify + SiriusXM. Spotify should be much better, but it's not. I'm thinking of dropping it soon. Why doesn't Spotify still not have a Pandora style radio station? I just want to create 5 or 10 statiosn that auto pick based on certain criteria, does this exist?

> Why doesn't Spotify still not have a Pandora style radio station? I just want to create 5 or 10 statiosn that auto pick based on certain criteria, does this exist? Spotify does have this. They've had it forever. It automatically happens after listening to a song you like, or you can make a playlist and generate a radio off of it. The recommendations are so far ahead of pandora it's like the difference between AIM c…

In my experience the recommendations are always converging to songs I've already listened to hundreds of times.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#620

Post by notpachet »

hammock wrote: post #618
jmarchello wrote: post #495

Anytime I see layoffs like this, All I hear is "We hired for the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal 'growth', But now reality has set in and we need our employees to serve a purpose beyond simply headcount". In my opinion they did these employees a disservice by hiring them in the first place. We need our companies to act more responsibly regardless of the price of capital. Innovate sure, but…

>Anytime I see layoffs like this, All I hear is "We hired for the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal 'growth', But now reality has set in and we need our employees to serve a purpose beyond simply headcount".... In my opinion they did these employees a disservice by hiring them in the first place. We need our companies to act more responsibly regardless of the price of capital. Innovate sure,…

> They were being responsible at the time.

Another strong contender for humanity's future epitaph.

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