Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17% • Hacker News Board

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#391

Post by UncleMeat » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 1:45 PM UTC

relativ575 wrote: post #353

thelastknowngod wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah you're not entitled to anything in the States. There are no employment contracts and you can be fired for any reason without notice. The only reason to give severance is to avoid bad publicity. There isn't any mandate that the company has to offer anything. There really should be though especially when the company in question was able to afford $1 billion in stock buybacks just 2 years ago, and when the CEO has…

> There are no employment contracts and you can be fired for any reason without notice. You can also leave the job at any time, which as a frequent HN user I'm sure you know and may have used it to your advantage. > There really should be though especially when the company in question was able to afford $1 billion in stock buybacks just 2 years ago, and when the CEO has a $3 billion net worth They were also in a hiri…

The employer/employee relationship is imbalanced. The ability to leave jobs instantly is not equivalently powerful as the ability to fire people instantly. A corporation that loses an employee suddenly is typically disrupted in a very minor way. A person that loses their job instantly might not make rent next month.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#392

Post by kranke155 » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 1:45 PM UTC

eps wrote: post #376

kranke155 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The X layoffs are too soon to make a judgement call on, look at the advertiser fight X is involved in now. Its up in the air if they kept enough people to make advertisers happy or moderation. Moderation has become a real problem on X, Ive sent reports that were clearly a problematic account, sometimes even fake accounts that are stealing identities, and the X UI sends me a message saying "nah all good"

The advertiser fight is primarily caused by Musk's inane comments, not layoffs or the lack of moderation. They do contribute, but to a way lesser degree.

So he didnt layoff part of the advertising team? It seems to me to be directly related to moderation, since its the usual "we dont want our ad to be near X" X being something advertisers steer clear of.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#393

Post by izacus » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 1:45 PM UTC

sligor wrote: post #133

izacus wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maintaining a large worldwide music/podcast delivery platform. What do you think they're doing?

Well, whatsapp reached 1 billion user with only around 50 employees

Last I checked it's not a music delivery platform.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#394

Post by InCityDreams » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 1:46 PM UTC

sva_ wrote: post #384

Mindwipe wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you can listen to them for free but with ads.

No.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#395

Post by emmet » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 1:46 PM UTC

altdataseller wrote: post #266

gumballindie wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Almost everyone I know uses it daily. Counterpoint: almost no one I know uses it. It was fun at first but became boring fast, a bit like Netflix. If I want to listen to music I use youtube.

Same, most people I know use Apple Music while others use YouTube Premium

I am one of the 8 people in the UK that use Apple Music. Literally everyone uses Spotify outside of America.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#396

Post by s3p » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 1:47 PM UTC

thiago_fm wrote: post #3

They need a bigger cut. 17% will not have a big enough impact to its bottom line. They need to have enough money to invest in other initiatives, as the business they are in is proven to be margin-thin. Apple and Amazon will eventually eat Spotify given enough time, if they don't find a moat to be built

Moat??? Spotify has the largest userbase period. Paying or non paying. Apple and Google haven’t been able to take their market share.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#397

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 1:47 PM UTC

mlrtime wrote: post #307

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #40

I often wonder what kind of work actually happens at Spotify. Pretty much every major change to the software or api since I started using it has made the product worse. Breaking libspotify, pointless UI redesigns, obvious, user-facing bugs that go unfixed for years. Removing features like play queue for long periods. There's metadata errors and even audio corruption in some albums that I actually reported to them yea…

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?

[deleted]

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#398

Post by ghaff » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 1:48 PM UTC

oblio wrote: post #275

rodlette wrote: post #225

I'm embarrassed to admit that despite having had Spotify for years, my music tastes didn't change much. I switched back to albums, and can thankfully pick clients that suit my taste. * https://gitlab.com/souch/SMP for Android * https://apps.gnome.org/Amberol/ for desktop Linux Beets and rsync manage tags and distribution.

> I'm embarrassed to admit that despite having had Spotify for years, my music tastes didn't change much. Don't be embarrassed, that's probably most people. We like what we like.

Napster and, later, streaming caused me to experiment a bit more. But although I picked up various artists and genres over the years I'm still pretty rooted in what I liked during college and early adult years. If my access to streaming were cut off tomorrow, I'd be pretty content with my mostly ripped from CD music library.

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#399

Post by lotsofpulp » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 1:49 PM UTC

hackernewds wrote: post #43

surgical_fire wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Er... There's nothing wrong with that. I mean, we do live in a world where businesses are supposed to be profitable. Companies hire and companies fire, that is part of the deal. One thing is to have layoffs when you are raking in record profits. This doesn't seem to be the case. The text makes a decent enough case.

sure, but call a spade a spade instead of making the layoffs seem mandatory. there are inputs to financial goals - including executive greed.

What would your plan be to stop Spotify from losing tens and hundreds of millions of Euros per year?

Re: Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

#400

Post by izacus » Mon, Dec 04, 2023, 1:49 PM UTC

happytiger wrote: post #155

sigilis wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to the technical work of keeping the servers running and the infra reliable, there is probably a great deal of work getting content licensing deals, working on marketing, managing the whole edifice, and stuff like that. They need a huge number of content “suppliers” to get basically every song in every country. They undoubtedly have a large number of developers working on apps for every platform, keeping…

Maybe. But for perspective it’s approximately 1/40th of the number of people that were employed at the peak of the Apollo moon landing missions (400,000 people) and that required the support of over 20,000 firms and universities. It’s a LOT of humans for streaming music service.

Last I checked Apollo didn't have to deal with worldwide music licensing or have an audience of 500 million people across the world it needs to serve.

This comparison is fundamentally dumb. What's next, asking why you need hundreds of thousands of employees to run worldwide store business and comparing it to Voyager program?