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.
Spotify to axe 1,500 workers to save costs
Submitted 11 months ago by otter@lemmy.ca to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67611361
Comments
Modva@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Marin_Rider@aussie.zone 11 months ago
profit has been tasted, now unfettered greed takes over
BossDj@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Do they rehire after the investors meeting?
silverbax@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
EnderMB@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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…
hunter2@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Anyone knows why Spotify needed 9000 employees in the first place?
Sheeple@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
BruceTwarzen@kbin.social 11 months ago
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.
azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
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.
BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
yaaaaayPancakes@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
hunter2@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
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.
cyrano@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
Yeah that is a huge number
PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de 11 months ago
to make the worst UX bugged up PoS app in the entire play store
grayman@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Seems to be a lot of competition there.
EnderMB@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
SaltySalamander@kbin.social 11 months ago
Oh, hey, look at that. I just axed Spotify to save myself money. Fuck Spotify.
glitches_brew@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I said, ‘fuck it, why not?’ when the whole joe rogan boycott happened. Have not missed Spotify one bit since.
DahGangalang@infosec.pub 11 months ago
What do you do for music instead?
hesusingthespiritbomb@lemmy.world 11 months ago
How do they have this many employees and an absolutely trash android app?
Kiosade@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
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…
Bluefold@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
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.
31337@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
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.
talentedkiwi@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
In my experience it’s always new apps that ruin the existing experience.
Raiderkev@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz 11 months ago
To be fair, both Apple Music and Tidal are trash on Android. And Apple is a $3 trillion company with over 150k employees.
tcely@fosstodon.org 11 months ago
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.
dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
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.
Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
I blamed my Subaru for a lot of my issues then i switched apps and amazingly every single issue went away.
grayman@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
CAVOK@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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. ^Borrowed from a local paper^
nixcamic@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Didn’t they also slash how much they pay artists? What exactly is the point of Spotify?
cosmicrookie@lemmy.world 11 months ago
The point is to make as much profit as possible without losing too many subscribers. This includes cutting expenses both internally and externally
Contend6248@feddit.de 11 months ago
Wow essentially like any other company
drmoose@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
thenightisdark@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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!!
raptir@lemdro.id 11 months ago
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.
baked_tea@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Profit
raptir@lemdro.id 11 months ago
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.
onlinepersona@programming.dev 11 months ago
The first quarter they are profitable ever: AXE THEM!
Burn_The_Right@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
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.
SCB@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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
dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
You can’t sub to podcasts on spotify like that. He just makes money on contract.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 11 months ago
Yes, fire everybody. That’s surely a fantastic long term plan to make that all-important line go up.
ozmot@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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?
fosforus@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago
They reported a profit before these layoffs. I don’t think they’re going bankrupt.
BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social 11 months ago
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.
drmoose@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
fosforus@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago
Well I guess I did correct by switching to Tidal. From Apple Music.
dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 months ago
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.
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.
mrfriki@lemmy.world 11 months ago
And then Spotify will be €50 a month because costs.
GerPrimus@feddit.de 11 months ago
This is all your fault, you goddamn white noise listeners!
xc2215x@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Unfortunate to see.
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 11 months ago
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!
Copernican@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
Jessvj93@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
pineapplelover@lemm.ee 11 months ago
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.
otter@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
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
fosforus@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago
Tidal seems to be a fine alternative.
banneryear1868@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Jack Stratton still has the best take on Spotify
obamabinladen@fanaticus.social 11 months ago
Great 😃👍
windowsphoneguy@feddit.de 11 months ago
They could easily pay those workers by terminating the contract with Rogan
fosforus@sopuli.xyz 11 months ago
They also bought Michelle Obama and Duke&Duchess of Essex as podcasters. Not saying these are equivalent to Rogan, just that they seem to be burning money on things that has nothing to do with music. And very much not a fan of fucking up podcasts as a simple medium delivered by RSS instead of being a walled garden.
noodlejetski@lemm.ee 11 months ago
if it’s not available via RSS it’s not a podcast, it’s an audio show.
riskable@programming.dev 11 months ago
They’re investing heavily in podcasts because podcasts are far, far more profitable than music. If they can get people used to (and hooked) on listening to podcasts (any podcasts) through Spotify then all that money spent on popular podcasters will be worth it (in the end).
I’m sure Spotify would love it if they could stop streaming music entirely and just focus on podcasts. Streaming music costs them a ton of money and overhead (bureaucracy associated with keeping track of and paying artists globally with bazillions of laws and regulations and fees to navigate) whereas podcasts just cost bandwidth.
villainy@lemmy.world 11 months ago
This was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. When they started locking up shows to their app, I cancelled my subscription and dropped Spotify entirely. I don’t even listen to any of the shows they bought but I do listen to a lot of podcasts through Pocket Casts and take umbrage when anybody fucks with the standards.
EnderMB@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Big tech used to be built on the idea that you could work on a moonshot idea, have it fail, and then be reassigned to something new, or swallowed into new orgs. This way, you could work on the next Zune, Fire Phone, or Circles, and not fear for your job - like you would if you worked for a startup.
Now, they don’t give a fuck. If the moonshot fails, they move the exec to a new org, and fire the entire team. It means that companies like Spotify can diversify their offering while saving money, and due to the poor hiring market and general apathy of tech workers, they just deal with it.
Blackout@kbin.social 11 months ago
I think Joe was out of things to say 10 years ago. You could replace him with AI and never know the difference.
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I don’t think AI speaks “knuckledragger” well enough
MycoBro@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I don’t hate the man like a lot of people here but this a really good point.
theneverfox@pawb.social 11 months ago
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
LemmyIsFantastic@lemmy.world 11 months ago
You can be pissed off but he is still the number 1 listed/watched podcast in the world. It brings in subscribers.
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Fuck Joe Rogan
noodlejetski@lemm.ee 11 months ago
millions of flies cannot be wrong!
grayman@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Uh… Ok… Wow. So you understand how businesses work?