Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

> most employees are spineless and will fall in line.

I don't get this. It's a layoff - what do you think not spineless and not falling in line looks like?

Gotta love these euphemisms, “reducing our employee base”.

The problem is, once you adopt this mentality, there's often pushback that you should also consider labor just like a business acting in self interest. Labor should focus on their profits (comp vs time vs benefits of concern) and optimize on those, just as businesses do in terms of employment.

Labor should aim to do the least work possible for the most compensation and only do what gets by. Labor too is not a benevelot source of resources for a business to leverage, it's a two way street.

Instead I often hear a mixture of inconsistent arguments where after all moral and ethical lip service is exhausted, we fall back to the "business is business and not charity argument." That's fine (and I agree with it) but if we're going to strip away morals and ethical obligations in society from business, we need to do the same for labor and not chastise labor with morals and ethics to prevent double standards.

If we do want labor to follow moral and ethical social obligations that aren't focused on pure self interest at all times, then we should also talk about how businesses should also have some sort of loyalty and societal obligations as well.

We sort of need to pick one option, not pick and choose a mixture that benefits business entities above all else. Not that this specific post makes any such claims.

It sure does imply consequences. Click on that link in "answerable".

I switched to Tidal and have been pleased so far. It's not perfect, but it is focused on music, has a pretty good interface, and pays artists better than Spotify does.

Reasons I was unhappy with Spotify:

- They went all in on podcasts at the expense of the music interface. Too many little design choices trying to steer me into podcasts when I'm there for music.

- Their podcast strategy relies on leveraging their market position instead of adding value to the market.

  - Trying to replicate Patreon

  - Buying up a catalog of exclusive podcasts

- Not going to respond to any comments about this point, but the Joe Rogan thing left a sour taste in my mouth as well. In addition to other aspects of that debacle, it was not a sound business strategy.

The podcast app I use (PocketCasts) is generally pretty good, but it has enough annoyances that I thought I might as well try to switch and get all of my podcasts on Spotify. I couldn't get special Patreon feeds because Spotify doesn't support them. The reason is they want to roll out their own Patreon-like podcast payments mechanism. But as of when I left, they had not rolled it out across the board, and the podcasts I listen to were not supported.

I'm not sure what their value proposition to podcast producers is that would get them to switch from Patreon to Spotify, but I imagine that has something to do with the trouble rolling that out.

I don't recall the details, but I wasn't all that impressed with the Spotify podcast functionality as a user either.

If they spent money on paying musicians more instead of podcasters, made a podcast app worth using, and played nicely with the podcasting sphere, I probably would've stayed with them.

They got big because they solved problems. Then they shifted their strategy to leveraging their market position instead of solving problems. A sure sign a company has lost its way.