Hacker News Reader

Understand 2x, I was also looking across all the jobs at spotify. There are some that go as low as 70k salary, a majority seem to be 170k+. It was just for ease of calculation. even if we take 500k that's still 0.033% of revenue -_-

View on HN

You aren't using percentages correctly, I think you mean 3.3% (and 1% in your original comment). Also, as pointed elsewhere, revenue is not really relevant, majority of that cash flows directly to artists/labels.

Again, revenue is not really all that relevant for this kind of business. They’re a low margin business because they must pay huge bills to record labels. R&D doesn’t cut record label costs.

I'm having trouble understanding why 'revenue is not really all that relevant.'

If you're burning $40M a year, and you press a button to save $90M a year, yes your label costs are the same but how are you not now at +$50M a year?

Payroll is a cost, so it’s more relevant to think about a layoff in terms of its impact to profit (your example) than revenue. Lots of companies sell at a tight margin, so tiny cost savings as a percent of revenue can be a big difference in profit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com