1y ago

Spotify to axe 1,500 workers to save costs

www.bbc.com Spotify to axe 1,500 workers to save costs

The music-streaming company says it is making people redundant to "rightsize" the firm.

Spotify @lemm.ee

Nemeski @lemm.ee

1y ago

Spotify to axe 1,500 workers to cut costs

www.bbc.com /news/business-67611361

1 0

Hacker News @derp.foo

haxor @derp.foo

BOT

1y ago

Spotify to axe 1,500 workers to save costs

www.bbc.com /news/business-67611361

8 2

125 comments

They could easily pay those workers by terminating the contract with Rogan
- I think Joe was out of things to say 10 years ago. You could replace him with AI and never know the difference.
  
  I don't think AI speaks "knuckledragger" well enough
  
  I don’t hate the man like a lot of people here but this a really good point.
  
  The opposite. He never had anything to say, he was just a great interviewer.
  The problem is he started believing he had something to say, and started talking over guests he disagrees with... The last one I watched the guest spoke for less than 2 minutes before Joe went on a 5+ minute rant about how he didn't believe it. I can't even remember what it was about, because the guy didn't even get to lay out his argument
  We got it Joe, you think the world is a magical place and have strong opinions on how humans should interact. Let the science man talk
- Uh... Ok... Wow. So you understand how businesses work?
- You can be pissed off but he is still the number 1 listed/watched podcast in the world. It brings in subscribers.
  
  Fuck Joe Rogan
  
  millions of flies cannot be wrong!

Just as they announced their profitable quarter.
This isn't to "Save costs". It's to further boost profits at any measure, which is what publically traded companies want. Happy investors.
- profit has been tasted, now unfettered greed takes over
- Do they rehire after the investors meeting?
  
  Maybe not rehire, but many companies will actively continue hiring just as many as they lay off. Citibank did this for years. Announce layoffs of 5,000 employees, stock goes up, but also hire 5,000 with no announcement.
  Does it eventually kill the company to do this? In many cases, yes.
  
  Rarely. They'll hire for some teams, but the roles were eliminated to directly reduce their headcount.
  Companies want a revolving door of talent, but they also want fewer people...

Anyone knows why Spotify needed 9000 employees in the first place?
- Probably devs, updates, the verification and review process for music, reports. Apparently they also create playlists by hand.
  The annoying ads also won't create themselves. There's a lot of effort being put into making them as annoying as possible actually.
  
  Wow, i really need to stop using spotify. 9000 people somehow created the worst algorithm possible. I have 800 songs in my playlist and their "randomiser" is the worst thing i have ever seen. I accidentally added one stand up track and all their enhanced randomiser adds are comedy tracks. And not even new ones, it's always the same ones. The app is dumb as hell. Click a odcast accidentally and never get rid of it from the home screen ever again. Instead of paying their artists or apparently workers, they aquire shit like joe rogan.
  
  Each of those should be a team, not a 1k+ person department. A few tens of engineers for dev, the same for QA and DevOps, then maybe a few hundred employees for all the review processes, marketing, relationships with music labels&advertisers, etc.
  Discord famously runs (ran) with 50-odd engineers. Silicon Valley's VC-backed economy is famously terrible with over-highering by orders of magnitude, and since interest rates went up some of those companies realized that maybe they should stop burning so much money.
- Trying to come up with rough IT numbers and I don't think I could break 500 (depends on how much they self-host and not considering contractors). Even if I bump it up to 4500 it seems insane for a large "digital distribution" company to have 50% of its workforce to be non-IT.
  
  My buddy works there now, as the audiobook company he worked for got acquired by them.
  You would be shocked how stupid and manual the content acquisition process is. Book publishers might as well still be operating back in the 90s, it's all phone calls and spreadsheets attached to the emails and manual FTP uploads.
  If the music business is anything like the audiobook business they likely need so many non IT just to keep the machine fed with content.
  
  That is what I was thinking, too. Maybe it's really just marketing, hand curated content like someone commented or something else non technical.
  I saw banks being maintained by 10-20 people.
- Yeah that is a huge number
- It doesn't surprise me all that much, as someone that works for a big tech company.
  A small number of that will be IC's and managers that keep the services going, alongside people that create FOH stuff. Alongside that, they'll likely have a lot of people in data storage, data science, perhaps even research science. Put these across multiple continents and timezones, and you've likely got a few thousand.
  The majority after this are likely upper management, sales and account staff (you'd be shocked at how many of these exist in media tech), and internal teams. Again, put these around the world, maybe even more so, as some account staff will work with people in local markets, so you'll have people in dozens of countries.
  Operationally, they need nowhere near this amount, but if you want to achieve "growth" you need all the supporting stuff.
- to make the worst UX bugged up PoS app in the entire play store
  
  Seems to be a lot of competition there.

Oh, hey, look at that. I just axed Spotify to save myself money. Fuck Spotify.
- I said, 'fuck it, why not?' when the whole joe rogan boycott happened. Have not missed Spotify one bit since.
  
  What do you do for music instead?

How do they have this many employees and an absolutely trash android app?
- A lot of these “auto-pilot” apps have thousands of people employed, I don’t get it. Like, what is there to work on once you have things working pretty well? If anything they just start ruining the product over time…
  
  Tbh most employees at a company this size become risk mitigation more than anything else. Once you've reached a certain level of success, you're looking at what doesn't move the needle as much as what makes it move positively. There could be a feature that is a major QoL improvement, but because in a test segment it performed 1% worse than base then it won't be implemented.
  Spotify, I believe, still works in the tribe and guild model that they created.
  Chapter = people with the same skill set, squad = a group of people from different chapters focused on a single project, tribe = a group of squads focused on a large business goal, guild = a collective of folks who have a shared interest like Data Privacy.
  Suffice to say, Agile is an imperfect tool and as you try to scale it, you need an increasing number of people to support it and make it run. Coders and Designers are likely just a fraction of their head count.
  I've worked places that don't have that support structure in place and they've stagnated for years struggling to get the most basic of decisions made. Decisions is what it is about too. Rarely do you get actual leadership from the c-level and especially from a CEO. So you end up with a lot of cooks trying to work out why the broth doesn't taste quite right and lacking confidence to just add a bit of salt.
  
  Probably data-analysis/AI type stuff to track users and advertise "better," making the backend more efficient to reduce costs, and adding support for new hardware. A lot of big, very profitable companies also have skunkworks-like projects for exploring new ideas and prototypes, most of which never make it into production.
  
  In my experience it's always new apps that ruin the existing experience.
  
  Well, they have to make new, broken terrible features and then come fix them when people complain by basically putting it back to how it was.
- To be fair, even Apple Music and Tidal are trash on Android. And Apple is a $3 trillion company with over 150k employees.
  
  It's both amazing and annoying that Google is perfectly able to create useful apps for iOS (despite the huge limitations the OS imposes) but Apple can't figure out how to make any Android app that isn't utter crap with fewer restrictions imposed on them.
  @d3Xt3r
  @hesusingthespiritbomb
- I blamed my Subaru for a lot of my issues then i switched apps and amazingly every single issue went away.
- The app exists in its current state on purpose. The idea is not to give you a seamless and masterful listening experience. If it was, they wouldn't compress tracks to 192kbps or less. The idea is to keep you trapped in their ecosystem and give you just enough value to not cancel your subscription.
- My guess is for every 1 developer there's 10 or more non technical administrative jobs. Most tech companies are grossly fat worth useless non productive employees that do very menial bureaucratic work. Think Office Space, but less neck ties.

If the workers of Spotify had been unionized then the CEO Daniel Ek wouldn't have been able to fire 1500 people by sending them an email.

The first quarter they are profitable ever: AXE THEM!

Didn't they also slash how much they pay artists? What exactly is the point of Spotify?
- The point is to make as much profit as possible without losing too many subscribers. This includes cutting expenses both internally and externally
  
  Wow essentially like any other company
- Short term profit
- Not really, they set a "minimum threshold" of unique annual listeners to get a payout. If a song has at least 1000 unique listeners per year it gets the same payout it did before. If it gets 999 it gets zero.
  
  It's 1000 playbacks, not 1000 unique listeners.
- The change exclude payouts that are under 1 cent or something like that. The news got hijacked by click and rage baiters like this title by the Guardian (which I won't link):
  Spotify made £56m profit, but has decided not to pay smaller artists
  The smaller artists would literally get single digit cents! The Spotify hate is getting astroturfed hard it almost seems.
  
  You say that like it's a defense though.
  Yeah they're paying the people who make the product we sell so little that they don't even get enough money in a paycheck to have it be worth sending them a paycheck!!
  
  No, they spun it that way by deceptively going on a rant about how many "songs get fewer than 1000 plays ever" and doing the math based on that in the "article," but that's not what the change actually was. If you read the details of the change below that, it is that they will no longer pay out at all for songs that get fewer than 1000 unique listeners per year.
  You still aren't talking a ton of money, but if each of 999 listeners streamed a song once per month, the artist could be losing close to $40 per song per year.

Yes, fire everybody. That's surely a fantastic long term plan to make that all-important line go up.

Maybe they could try not paying a fascist $200 million for his podcast. That would save some money right there.
Fuck Spotify and fuck Joe Rogan.
- As much as I dislike Rogan, he's hardly a fascist. He's just an idiot that agrees with anyone speaking confidently for more than 5 seconds.
  
  an idiot that agrees with anyone speaking confidently for more than 5 seconds.
  Isn't that the bread and butter of Fascists? It is pretty much the hallmark of a Fascist movement to have a "confident speaker" to wow the masses.
- Maybe they could try not paying a fascist $200 million for his podcast. That would save some money right there.
  Only if his podcast has fewer subscribers than generate $200M revenue
  
  You can't sub to podcasts on spotify like that. He just makes money on contract.

Because of interest rates hikes, companies like Spotify have to focuses on more trivial matters like being profitable. 17% lay off seems like a lot. I wonder if they will go bankrupt?
- Spotify's issue isn't unique. Fundamentally, given how much money the labels demand and how relatively low streaming subscription fees are, there's simply not a ton of money around. Spotify has been unprofitable for most of the past few years. The fact of the matter is that people expect to be able to listen to essentially all music for a relatively cheap price, and labels expect to get most of that money. The specifics of the company don't matter much. If Spotify dies, people will migrate to another platform, and the finances won't be meaningfully different there. Maybe someone like Apple could afford to eat the losses or is actually big enough to tell the labels to pound sand, but otherwise, this is just kinda what the situation is.
  
  I think it's more related to rising interest rates which hasn't happened for decades now. I don't Spotify is in any real trouble tbh, it's just house cleaning and future planning given the business landscape changes.

Hopefully this includes the guy that changed it so there's always some Taylor Swift song instead of what I was actually listening to last when I open the app.
- Sincere question: do you use a unique, secure password on your Spotify account, and are you sure that it's never been compromised? Your story sounds very similar to a case where a Spotify account was being used by someone else.
  Reply All episode about it: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/j4he7lv
  
  No the queue will now add popular Playlists to what you were listening to when you restart the app if your previous queue was a generated one. Not sure the exact steps to cause it but it seems like if you were listening to a daily Playlist close the app, the next day the Playlist has updated and instead of pointing to the new daily it decides to point to one of the popular Playlist for your next songs in queue. It doesn't stop the song you paused on it just adds new shit to the queue after it once it loses track of where to point. Seems like they should just start shuffling your liked songs in that case but nope it points to a random pop Playlist.
  
  I use a complex password. I don't see a way to view logged in devices but nothing else is fishy so I'm assuming it's something some marketing idiot came up with.

Fire the payola people that make it so even if you hit shuffle, you'll only hear the same 10% of your playlist over and over again with the same artist 3 songs in a row.
They say that they can't release their randomizer algorithm to protect trade secrets. Which is exactly what a company engaging in payola would say.

And then Spotify will be €50 a month because costs.

This is all your fault, you goddamn white noise listeners!

Unfortunate to see.

I've been in tech for a while, I can't tell how much of this is due to over hiring and over paying for work during that crazy time 2 years ago. I had lots of friends bounce to hire paying jobs and a lot of folks were just trying to gobble up talent. A lot of those places doing that seemed to be having big lay offs in the years following. I think there was a lot of optimism back the about the market, and it seems like course correction and pessimistic outlooks at play.
- On top of that, moneys tight right now. Saw 3 months of spotify premium dangled for 10 bucks like a week or two ago and it just seemed desperate to me. Still haven't come back tho, broke, and I feel for these employees.

This is the best summary I could come up with:
Swedish music-streaming giant Spotify has announced it is cutting 17% of its workforce, about 1,500 jobs, as the company seeks to clamp down on costs.
Spotify employs about 9,000 people, and Mr Ek said "substantial action to rightsize our costs" was needed for the company to meet its objectives.
Mr Ek said that given the recent "positive" results, the job cuts being announced "will feel surprisingly large" for many people.
He said Spotify had considered making smaller reductions during 2024 and 2025, but decided that more drastic action was needed to improve the company's finances.
Since it launched, Spotify has spent a lot of money on growing the business, and in securing exclusive content such as podcasts created by the likes of Michelle and Barack Obama as well as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
Commenting on podcast content, Mr Ek told the BBC in September: "The truth of the matter is some of it has worked, some of it hasn't."
The original article contains 302 words, the summary contains 161 words. Saved 47%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Despite being a shit company, them and apple music, maybe youtube music are the only top alternatives. Yes I can easily pirate and have downloaded spotify music using Spotdl but I also listen to podcasts on there and I don't want it to clutter up my newpipe or libretube feed.
- Yea I'll probably keep using them, and advocate for better pay / pay artists another way
  This is what people mean where piracy is a service problem. It's much more convenient to have nearly ALL the music available on each of the platforms.
  I wonder if that's the biggest reason people pirate movies and TV, but pay for music and games. Not having to juggle where all the content is