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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%

#861

Post by tootie »

byyll wrote: post #248

Can 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.

I doubt even half their staff is product development. Acquiring and licensing content is very complicated. Marketing, advertising and operations. Their entire podcast stack includes not only end-user experience, they own multiple podcast production and analytics tools (via acquisition of Megaphone, Anchor, Chartable) not to mention their in-house production via stuff like Gimlet.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#862

Post by tootie »

dijit wrote: post #282

Reminds 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…

Is their cloud bill more or less than they pay Joe Rogan?

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#863

Post by dijit »

tootie wrote: post #862
dijit wrote: post #282

Reminds 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…

Is their cloud bill more or less than they pay Joe Rogan?

more, actually.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#864

Post by danielmarkbruce »

atbpaca wrote: post #858

I wish CEOs would resign when layoffs happen. It should be like some governments where the whole cabinet resigns. If layoffs are a necessity, then the CEO and the top management should show the example and take responsibility for taking the company into the wrong direction, leading to layoffs. That would be fair and more understable than a "thank you for your hard work and commitment".

Business decisions are difficult. If the result of everyone that didn't pan out was "you are fired", no one would take any risk, decisions would take forever.

It's so hard to fire people in France, that some large companies simply have a policy of "no france office".

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#865

Post by danielmarkbruce »

mahmoudhossam wrote: post #199

This isn't about rising costs though, this is about the labels and shareholders being greedy and wanting an even bigger piece of the cake that is already massive. Meanwhile artists are getting paid next to nothing and now even workers are getting the short end of the stick.

Have you looked at the financials? The company runs net losses, every year. Losses are not a "massive cake", they are a "massive hole".

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#866

Post by danielmarkbruce »

myspy wrote: post #292
lotsofpulp wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much more money do you want Spotify to lose? https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SPOT/spotify-techn... https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/ https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/ Shareholders have a 1.52% return since it went public, Apr 2018. A riskless investment in sp500 earned 11.7% since Apr 2018. How much more do you want shareholders to lose? They have been losing 10%+ per year for 5.5 yea…

I‘m no business major, I have no clue how to handle a company on a stock market. But the results I see is that leadership took steps that let into people loosing their jobs. Why are shareholders and management so important and employees at the branches are not? Everyone in that chain should be taken into account.

If they keep running losses, every employee loses their jobs. The company is losing money.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#867

Post by lotsofpulp »

savanaly wrote: post #855
keehun wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you primarily listen to classical music, Apple's new Classical Music app (part of its Music subscription) is *fantastic*.

I was using Apple Classical happily for ~1 month, then it stopped working. It would load all the metadata and let me browse around but when trying to play a song it wouldn't progress. I restarted my phone, reinstalled the app, went through several iterations of iOS updating, the problem never went away. No other app, including Spotify, has this issue on my phone. After a month of paying for Apple Music without Classi…

FYI, you can contact Apple technical support pretty easily. I have been able to talk to a real person quickly a few times over the years.

https://support.apple.com/contact

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#868

Post by [deleted] »

alejoar wrote: post #835
keehun wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you primarily listen to classical music, Apple's new Classical Music app (part of its Music subscription) is *fantastic*.

What's not fantastic is apple's lock down of their ecosystem. I'm not paying for some lacking android app by Apple.

[deleted]

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#869

Post by varjag »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #694
varjag wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10000 employees with let's say 40% overhead translates into 2000 3-ish lean teams. Certainly some would be far larger than 3 person but even then. Is Spotify surface that huge really?

Maybe? At Spotify’s scale, those teams would include things like “GCP-friendly audio encoding optimization” or “playlist sharing scalability”. I don’t know enough to estimate what a reasonable size should be (if such an estimation is even possible), but running software for hundreds of millions of users is hard.

Honestly (for someone also working with audio) these team descriptions sound like they would idle most of the time.

My usual yardstick is Apollo programme development team size: about 600 developers. Relatively few tasks are substantially more challenging than writing code that would get people to the Moon and back. There have to be some that are as hard or harder naturally. But when you see a commercial company that has an order of magnitude or two more devs than that, using modern tooling and conveniences, it's hard to fathom.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#870

Post by kwanbix »

deng wrote: post #845
kwanbix wrote: post #788

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deezer is a completely mistery to me. I'm asking: What does Deezer really have? They don't own the music. They don't own podcasts (OK, they may have some exclusives). All they have is a license, a bit of software, and lots of users. How will they ever turn a profit? What's the end game here? I just switched my whole family from Deezer to tidal and it was literally a matter of minutes. There are even services that mov…

Very witty. Yes, the same applies to Deezer. What I'm saying is: it's a race to the bottom, and in the end, musicians will suffer (they already do).

But I think the problem is the music companies. Spotify says they have given 40 billion (american) to the music companies.
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