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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%

#881
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well how about thinking stakeholders first and shareholders second? Firing your employees because you are incompetent leadership and management without good foresight should result in letting you go. Why the high compensation for leadership when it doesn‘t know what it does? Braun didn‘t get the design leader in the past because they threw out their team, they got there because they kept the team together. The more y…

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…

> A riskless investment in sp500

Just a nitpick, but this isn't the traditional definition of "riskless", which would be Treasuries. I believe the S&P 500 experiences an average drawdown of 14% in any given year, so it's hardly without risk.

You could more accurately say that SPOT has been underperforming "the market", "equities", or "beta".

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#882
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well how about thinking stakeholders first and shareholders second? Firing your employees because you are incompetent leadership and management without good foresight should result in letting you go. Why the high compensation for leadership when it doesn‘t know what it does? Braun didn‘t get the design leader in the past because they threw out their team, they got there because they kept the team together. The more y…

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…

Given that the major shareholders are the big music rights holders which is one of Spotifies major costs shareholder have done alright.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#883

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…

Given that the major shareholders are the big music rights holders which is one of Spotifies major costs shareholder have done alright.

This is not true. They must be very insignificant shareholders (less than 1%).

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SPOT/holders/

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#884

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…

> A riskless investment in sp500 Just a nitpick, but this isn't the traditional definition of "riskless", which would be Treasuries. I believe the S&P 500 experiences an average drawdown of 14% in any given year, so it's hardly without risk. You could more accurately say that SPOT has been underperforming "the market", "equities", or "beta".

It is my tongue-in-cheek way of referring to the belief that the US federal government will ensure the broad market does not stay down for long.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#885

I didn’t know they have that many people (9000) to work for a single product. I’ve been a subscriber for more than 5 years and the app on the iPhone just gets worse everyday. Why? - daily updates is gone. This is where I can get a snapshot of all new releases from artists I love. I’m not sure if Release Calendar is the new one but I don’t bother to check. - I listen to classical and the song title naming is just subp…

> I didn’t know they have that many people (9000) to work for a single product.

I would presume it's many more products than just Spotify app.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#886

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".

And yet companies are founded every day in France, and their economy is doing just fine.

If a business cannot afford to do business in a country, then that business should not be allowed to do business in that country.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#887
post #96

The elephant in the room: Will Spotify survive the coming wave of generative AI audio content? Wasn't any mentioning on that in the letter. Seems to me like they would need to ditch a lot of silly investments like original content, platform engineering on Kubernetes and scaled agile which together carry costs in the range of $100s millions, to free up resources to battle new disruptive technologies.

I would think so, people want to listen to swift and drake not some ML song with no relevance.

Tbh I would rather listen to a ML song than drake. At least the ML song would sound less robotic.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#888

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Does any other brand have something similar to Apple's support? I was kinda surprised to see that you could get called back as easily as I did. Or that their stores could quickly fix e.g. a bricked bootloader. The Windows/Android devices I had before had nothing like that.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#889
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*.

another nice option is Qobuz, the sound quality is good for the newer releases.

The UI was one step below Spotify or Apple the last time I tried it though.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#890
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…

Generally I agree with what your saying, but > I've seen their cloud bill and it's significantly higher than 1,600 peoples jobs An apples-to-apples comparison requires looking at all associated costs of switching to on prem (salaries, hardware, etc...). I've only been a part of this analysis at a company dealing with a cloud bill in the low tens of millions, nowhere near the scale of Spotify (and I'm still relatively…

Cloud providers would benefit from actively fighting such abstractions.
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