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Comment by piva00 | Hacker News Reader

> Sometimes I don't understand how jumping from winamp to spotify goes from a handful to 10000 employees. Winamp + audiogalaxy (ah memories) probably covers 90% of spotify use case with probably 10 engineers, then just get some suckers to curate playlists for free.

The complexity is not the player, it's the whole business... Winamp didn't have recommendations, tack on another 100-200 people working on data to surface those. There are close to a 100 markets being offered content with licencing deals, each with different regulations.

There are internal platforms, infrastructure, development, each platform requires team(s) to maintain, and develop them.

What's the size of the largest tech company (with a single product) that you've worked at? Just so I know how to translate how larger organisations work to a worldview that you have experience with.

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No need, I was being flippant. I don't work in tech but dealt with large orgs. Broad point is, by all means, have your headcount for signing labels, localization, maintaining physical infra. But past a certain amount of brains and you get feature/vision creep that starts degrading core product. Where/when that point is of course highly subjective.

But how many employees does a music streaming service need? I don't know, but last I read, Valve had less than 500 employees on everything including Steam before they ramp up headcount for hardware. Did spotify need 20x more? Maybe nature of music streaming needs 9000 more employees to deal with labels. But my uninformed opinion is, probably not.

Well I just googled and Valve has 1,139 employees, and Spotify will now have 7,800 - It's nowhere near 20x.

Still a big gap, although I suspect they are very different offerings and companies. Differences include:

* Spotify needs to sell ads (to support it's free tier). This requires engineering and people to sell the ads.

* Spotify is in a more competitive market than Steam (who have a nearly de-facto monopoly) so more advertising/marketing effort is required.

* Interfacing with the entire global music industry takes time and resource.

There may also be differences to the extent these companies outsource and use contractors which could make it more difficult to see actual headcount.

Spotify is also a de facto monopoly.

Spotify has ~30% of the market, Apple Music, Tencent, and Amazon have each ~13%, YouTube Music another ~9%.

That's far from a monopoly...

Didn’t even know Tencent had a music streaming service, but their numbers look amazing:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TME/tencent-music-...

I presume they don’t have to pay rent to a few big copyright holders like Spotify does.

A monopoly of what? A few people’s podcasts?

Those were the days. Winamp. The tiny media player that booted instantly, had such a low fingerprint you could safely have it playing while gaming. The media player you could re-skin. You could later hook into lastfm to "scrobble" your listens if you wanted them to persist after a WinXP reinstall.

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