Spotify lays off 200 employees, or about 2% of its workforce
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
It was always a labo(u)r of love, and never seemed to have widespread support, due to the tiny userbase.
Spotify's UI is wonky and lacks visual appeal at most times for me. Having to frequently go back to the app to control or change what is playing is quite annoying, it really only needs to be a small scale floating window, as music player tech really hasn't changed dramatically since winamp. Spotify is not a revolutionary company at all, even Soundcloud (still not great to independent musicians either) has had a more visually appealing layout that values artists and the music content more than Spotify, and they've been that way for decades now.
This is false.
Did Spotify spend time on that?
"Spotify for Linux is a labor of love from our engineers that wanted to listen to Spotify on their Linux development machines. They work on it in their spare time and it is currently not a platform that we actively support." [1]
It's sad that desktop apps are so bad nowadays that we prefer the browser. I guess that's what happens when desktop apps are just packaged web apps.
I'm on mobile, so I can't check.
That said, their podcasting play has been poorly executed and I imagine they are losing plenty here with no real profit solution in sight.
by essentially no ownership what I mean is that the amount of ownership granted to workers via equity is negotiated as part of overall compensation in wage labor market (market means it's as low as each company can competitively get away with, so just saying the share exists does not mean it's of the same class), the majority ownership is elsewhere and there are a lot of non-workers who need to get rich off their work. commenting that ESOPs give workers and their owners the same sense of stakeholder ownership is as interesting as saying america has a universally flat ownership class structure because everyone can buy a share on the market
I rarely watch it since the move away from YouTube but as far as I'm aware they haven't released numbers.
During the pandemic he had a lot of notoriety and relevance because he would platform opinion contrary to the establishment governmental health authorities. To a large degree because of the mis/disinformation guidelines on social media sites, his podcast was the only place a lot of that information could be found and his show gained popularity with a new silo of listeners. He achieved a lot of relevance from that group…and the media because of it, which was hellbent on attempting to “correct” his allegedly dangerous opinions.
And I suppose more famously they did make Joe Rogan exclusive to Spotify as well, and he's probably the biggest name in podcasting
Don't forget also forcefully add Podcasts to the UI and not allow hiding them. Also some irritating prompts in the initial rollout that kept begging you to try podcasts.
I basically unsubscribed and switched to YT Music because of that.
It's one thing for a company to offer a new service, it's another to try and push shit on consumers that aren't interested.
Not at Spotify, it happens too many places.
Now it seems like since the FAANGs are doing it everyone else is jumping on board. Tech layoffs have become trendy. That's a pretty surprising outcome.
The people who were employees and didn't get laid off, they worked extra hours.
If you are flexible, layoffs are probably good for the economic reorganization. If you aren't flexible, this is probably an incredibly stressful time.
The worst is being the team that shuts the lights off behind them, you can expect high expectations paired with salary cuts and getting dumped into the labor pool at the bottom of the market. If things magically do go well those rewards flow to the investors.
So far I've only been in the 2nd group and it sucks.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/06/apple-podcasts-subscr...
Eh, as someone who never listened to the big guys or use Apple's podcasts, I'd hardly give Apple credit. It was just impossible to put podcasts behind a paywall after they were free for a decade.
It truly seems like a stupid thing. Reminds me of how one of the satellite radio companies would buy a popular radio host, and that popular radio host would lose their popularity in exchange for millions.
Except that it didn't.
Before Spotify, "podcasting" meant "open medium based on web standards". Spotify embraced/extended/extinguished it to the point that even technical people happily call shows distributed on closed platforms like Spotify and YouTube "podcasts".
Since freeing the word "podcasting" from its open, standards-based chains, Spotify now claims to be the largest podcast listening platform with 25% of U.S. listeners. As a closed platform, there's no way to independently verify whether Spotify is cooking their metrics books.
Yes, this is Spotify's argument to anyone who says it's bad that they liberated "podcasting" from web standards.
> The fact is that Apple checkmated them by allowing monetization of podcasts directly.
That's not how it works — as with Spotify, listeners pay Apple, and then Apple gives podcasters a percentage of the proceeds. https://podcasters.apple.com/support/892-apple-podcasters-pr...
What do they all do?
I feel sometimes that a lot of the HN folks work on small-scale companies, releasing MVPs and don't have much of an idea about the operations side of a larger operation. It's easy to think in MVP terms, it's really, really hard to understand the nuances (and costs) that scaling that to hundreds of millions of users across dozens to hundred+ countries entail.
[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/whatsapps-55-employee...
Those who find the last sentence counterintuitive should stop to note that if you use WhatsApp today you're interacting with a company with tens of thousands of employees.
Maybe it's a bit better. Is it 10000x better, though? I used Whatsapp before and after, and I find it hard to believe.
(One thing it's definitely better at, though: anything you say will almost instantaneously turn into an ad on the next website you visit.)
Of course there's some level of overhiring but whatever comment here saying that 1/10, or 1/2, or whatever other percentage is what is needed is baseless speculation on some non-informed guess. Without knowing the insides it's just baseless speculation, and even in the inside you'd need to be in a higher level of management to have a decent overview of what's waste (and why it's waste) vs what's actually needed.
Still sounds simpler than what Spotify does.
Just thinking about dealing with payment processing, regulatory environment of music licensing, customer support, and record labels around all countries on which they operate makes my head hurt a little.
But then again, your bad take is the reason I keep coming back to HN. I always find it amusing how people here always seem to have all the answers for things they never worked with. Most of the times I think people being butthurt for whatever reason.
This is outsourced.
> customer support
"Can't find the solution you're looking for? Here's how to get help from our experts. Note: We currently don't offer support by phone."
And half of what they do have is outsourced to "community members".
> regulatory environment of music licensing
This, this is what they do. So that's something. Is it 9600 people something? Apparently not since they already shaved off 6% of the work force earlier this year. It would seem their own CEO appears to agree with the take they are overweight.
Selling hardware around the world has tremendous regulatory burden as well. If you can't imagine the complexities of designing, sourcing and selling hardware products around the world maybe think harder?
Let the chips fall where they may. It isn't like it's the first or even biggest layoff for Spotify this year.
The Spotify most people know (finding and playing songs, creating playlists, recommendations), which obviously very important, is probably a tiny fraction of the complexity for the company.
I would wager the vast majority of the employees at Spotify are working on everything else needed to enable the above. The artists portal, analytics and royalties, paying the labels, paying the artists, legal for every country, etc.
Someone who knows could probably elaborate more than me on everything needed to run a company like that.
Does that require 8000 people? Debatable, but it's certainly more complex than clicking a song and playing it.
EDIT: A quick glimpse at job listing for Spotify on LinkedIn shows:
* Client Partner in India
* Business Operations in Nigeria
* Creator Partner Manager in Mexico
* Artist & Partnerships Manager in Egypt
* NLP Research Scientist in the USA
* Director of Sales in Singapore
Remember Spotify has approx. the same number of premium subscribers as Netflix has subscribers, so it's not exactly tiny.
In the Age of AI, even before 2023 and ChatGPT, localization is a very automatable+contractor heavy job that is very easy to complete. All of africa might need 3-4 teams of 20 people total, and that's including sales/marketing. Maybe double for South America.
The reason tech companies have expanded so much is it looks better when an 8000 employee company controls the worlds music than when an 800 person company does. Same with Google, Facebook, AirBnB, Netflix, etc. The tech monopolies want to make they monopolies seem less ridiculous to regulators.
No.
Over-hiring is probably the same everywhere. When "times are good", everyone in the organisation wants to hire because their number of subordinates makes them seem more important and accomplished.
Localisation isn’t just about language - consider payment requirements, legal and regulatory specific challenges, pricing strategy, regional licensing, there might be specific features required to support low bandwidth (eg carrier agreements), if you want to ad-support like Spotify you will need a team to sell ads… it’s hardly a chatgpt + few contractors job.
With a few k more you might plug leaks, and do actual maintenance of the ship. While you’re not always firefighting, you're also mostly just doing basic maintenance to ensure people don’t always work at 3am bailing out the ship to barely keep it afloat. No actual new fancy features being added to your ship.
If you want to actually build NEW features on your speedboat, you need even more people. And if you care about features, and not burning out employees, that’s how you get to 8k.
(Actual numbers may vary per business)
Seriously, what do you expect the answer to be? Have you worked in any large org with thousands of employees? They are all pretty similar, there's tech debt, there's new initiatives, there is maintenance to be done. You need to work in one to understand how the whole machine works, there's no simple answer to be given on HN about what they are all up to, it's a mix of all of the above as it'd be in any large org...
- N people to just juggle live incidents/emergencies. Actually triage, live, why the Desantis campaign launch on Twitter isn't working. Give the server more RAM, spin up more instances, pray it works.
- M+N people to do the work to prevent the incidents/emergencies (maintenance). Actually ensure the next big giant event on the streaming service doesn't cause failures. Create automatic scaling up of new capacity as needed. But avoid overprovisioning and costing the company a bazillion $$. Get to the bottom of what triggered the incident. Build practices, runbooks, etc the next time this happens.
- M+N+L people to actually create new stuff. Create a new feature on the live streaming service to comment or somesuch. (and all the work M+N people do to handle incidents with this new feature)
So X * (M+N+L) people if every product area is trying to create new stuff.
But the reality is most teams have T people where M < T < (M+N+L). Which is very company dependent.
Spotify has dozens of consumer facing product areas. Probably many more for creators, record labels, admins, etc etc
- Regularly have to restart the app
- Regularly on bluetooth headphones will get an error that you cannot play any songs.
This is literally by design. Amazon doesn't want you to search, they want you to buy what they suggest on the homepage. Spotify doesn't want you listening to what you want, they want to shove profitable songs down your throat. you know how radio in america is controlled by the labels? Same with spotify.
To do more (ex open in different markets) you need more people, but with more people you need more support people, which also need to be supported in turn ...
Next thing you know you have 5 engineers on Chaos Monkey so that your 20 SREs can more easily test their globally distributed low-latency CDN. You also have region lawyer manager VPs who manage lawyer teams per country, and are in turn managed by your glonal Head of Lawyering. Who also has an administrative assistant otherwise theyd lose head over the schedule and their tasks...
And we didn't even get to the programmers yet.
In rockets, to go a bit faster or haul a bit more mass, you need a lot more fuel.
Orgs are the same. Except they don't explode. Usually.
The company is absolutely heavy with highly paid department staff who are all working on fantasyware that does nothing to improve all of the things people complain about Spotify.
Not really?
I mean, it's a music streaming platform with global presence (and to my experience, with no downtime), dealing with the regulatory environment, record labels, payment processing, and taxation across all different jurisdictions. Also needs to have customer service support in all languages it operates.
If you ask me, 8k doesn't sound absurd at all. Maybe a bit on the high end of what I would have guessed, but I'm possibly not accounting for new things they might be developing as well.
Music streaming helped to almost double music industry revenue.
https://www.statista.com/chart/4713/global-recorded-music-in...
> Moreover, notes Werde, within the pie chart detailing the total revenue that Spotify generates through music streaming, “roughly 70% of it is going to rights holders,” he says. The actual recording artists? “They’re keeping anywhere between 5% and a quarter.”
The impact on actual album sales likely hits hard, too; I recall an artist on NPR talking about how one CD sale nets them more into their actual pocket than a hundred thousand streams.
> So none of [the royalty system] makes sense... if a song is played on the radio, 100% of the royalties go to the songwriter. But if the same song is played on a streaming service, only about 20% of the royalties go to the songwriter. Where does that come from?"
The point is that "helped to almost double music industry revenue" from upthread doesn't actually help the folks I want helped; it's a misleading stat.
You may be able to do it with a smaller label that is very friendly to artists, but you most likely aren't going to be able to access the most in-demand producers, have a label pay for all of your bills/food/rent/etc while you focus on the album.
But if they want to procure the services of the publishers, then they have to agree to the terms.
It's totally possible an artist makes a break on the internet. Sarah Crean blew up from 200 monthly listeners to almost 200,000 overnight because a music TikToker posted about how great her songs are as an independent artist. (TBH it is, go check it out)
Being independent is totally a way you can go, but if you'd want to make money in the industry to really live off of you have 2 options:
- Work a job (or 2) for hours a day to keep yourself fed/housed while also doing the job of 5-10 people to try to get your music noticed enough to make money directly from fans. - Sign up with a label, immediately get your daily life taken care of and focus on your music full time.
Sadly, for a lot of artists, the promise of being able to quit your job and focus on your passion full time is an offer too lucrative to turn down. It's an exploitative industry, but when it works it works. And when it fails, it's the artist that's left on the side of the highway. Labels are like casinos, the house never loses.
70% percent of Spotify revenue goes to the right holders vs ~40% of a CD sale. That artist must have signed really bad deal, or he/she is selling CDs themself which makes comparison really misleading.
As in any passion-driven industry: artists/creative gets shafted and exploited by middlemen (music labels, game studios/publishers, movie studios, etc.) solely because there's a never-ending stream of passionate individuals that will be exploited to have their creations out in the world.
But who needs to buy a song? Spotify (and Pandora, Grooveshark, etc.) brought the same streaming feature from YouTube and Netflix to music. That was even more consumer friendly.
[1] https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1413534752699830275