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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%

#941

Post by soderfoo »

araes wrote: post #935
tracerbulletx wrote: post #901

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every damned time this happens someone asks how it's possible they have so many employees when it's just an app... Spotify owns multiple large podcast studios, has sales people, negotiators, music industry people, lawyers, facility staff, lawyers, marketing, content curators. It is the business engine through which the vast majority of the world consumes music these days. You can quibble about if they have too many e…

Spotify's issues and costs are royalty payments. Of the €567 million increase in cost of revenue for the Nine months ended September 30, 2023, higher royalty costs were €534 million of that total. (~94%) [1] This delta is vs 7,159 total cost of revenue on 9,576 of revenue (€millions).[1, pg4] From looking at the rest of the report, most other cost of revenue contributors are minor (5 here, 10 there). In the total cat…

R&D increased as a % of revenue YOY. I think the increased cost of revenue is part of the story, the other being salaries and benefits rolling up to R&D

The R&D expense is fully within their control, while things are a bit more complex with licensing costs.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#943

Post by rumori »

keehun wrote: post #745
mrbonner wrote: post #743

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…

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

Also not fantastic, how Apple handles multiple devices. I forgot how they call it, but registering new devices is a pain, especially if you have multiple Macbooks, iPads, iPhone, there’s an edge case where you have to wait 90 days before it starts streaming to your brand new iPhone. You better reach out to their support, where they never acknowledge the issue but always fix it in 5 minutes.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250348779

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#944

Post by toofy »

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.

anecdotal, I have the apple family plan and my partner has no problems with the apple music app on her android—we’ve been on it for a couple years.

i’ve used her phone to control music on long car trips, if there are differences i haven’t noticed. again, anecdotal.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#945

Post by ttymck »

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…

This is a wild leap of twisted logic. You posit that they might not have to lay off employees if they instead.... Paid a team to manage their infrastructure instead of outsourcing that responsibility to the cloud.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#946

Post by ttymck »

expazl wrote: post #938
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".

That's like demanding that anytime a F1 driver takes a pit stop he should be fired. Obviously the pit stop itself doesn't improve the time, and he's just sitting still. Imagine if a driver was sitting still after the race started!? Layoffs are not desirable for a company, but sometimes they are required. The fact that a CEO decides to go with layoffs when it's the right thing to do shouldn't be seen as a failure of t…

That has to be one of the least applicable analogies.

Laying off 1/5 of staff is not a "pit stop" to refuel. It's an admission of staggering mismanagement.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#947

Post by gen220 »

anon23432343 wrote: post #185
TwentyPosts wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were these blind tests?

I played the same song from random services. They did not see the service nor the laptop. YouTube/Spotify/Apple/Tidal (We did not had access to more). YT usually was the worse followed by Spotify and then depending on the Genre either Tidal or apple won. All of them were in the highest settings. Sony xm4 as headphones.

Just curious, I have no stake in this, but did you have the "high quality audio" settings turned on for Spotify? I know they've had them in the past, I don't know what the specific name is for it these days.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#948

Post by Cub3 »

keehun wrote: post #745
mrbonner wrote: post #743

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…

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

The feature I miss that spotify has is being able to control music playing on my desktop from my phone or vice versa

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#949

Post by therealdrag0 »

soderfoo wrote: post #469
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…

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…

Kubernetes is a pretty decent abstraction no? If all your apps and databases are containerized you can deploy in azure or aws just as well. And many cloud DBs support open source interfaces like Cassandra or JMS or Kafka etc.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#950

Post by kirso »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #909
tracerbulletx wrote: post #901

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every damned time this happens someone asks how it's possible they have so many employees when it's just an app... Spotify owns multiple large podcast studios, has sales people, negotiators, music industry people, lawyers, facility staff, lawyers, marketing, content curators. It is the business engine through which the vast majority of the world consumes music these days. You can quibble about if they have too many e…

This seems false, Whatsapp became 'the business engine through which the vast majority of the world' sends texts on the backs of 20ish employees. Even assuming delivering music, podcasts, royalty payments, negotiations with artists, etc..., takes 100x more headcount in total, that should still be only around 2000 employees. 9000 just means most are not being that productive.

Apples and Oranges, not from a complexity perspective but WA was majorly subsidized by VC and later FB without monetization for years.

Spotify has a completely different business model, architecture etc.

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