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Comment by heyjamesknight | Hacker News Reader

This is what happens during periods of economic uncertainty. It's like counting cards with a freshly shuffled deck: nobody can tell what the state of the game is, so you place a minimum bet until you can get a feel for things again.

The movie is meh, but the boardroom scene in Margin Call has a great line:

"I'm here for one reason and one reason alone. I'm here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That's it. Nothing more. And standing here tonight, I'm afraid that I don't hear - a - thing. Just... silence."

Consumer confidence is down three straight quarters in a row. Nobody feels good about what the music is going to do next.

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> Consumer confidence is down three straight quarters in a row. Nobody feels good about what the music is going to do next.

Sure, but you can leave a downturn four ways:

1. You went out of business

2. You experienced a decline and let a lot of people go

3. You managed to stay roughly where you were, no further forward, no further backwards (this is a small success but still a great achievement) and you may have let some people go — the expression "running to stand still" applies here

4. You find a way to come out better than you went in and maybe continued to hire

Spotify feel like they've gone from #3 to #2, but they had ambitions to be #4 of those scenarios, they will likely survive, but in what form and with what potential? And more to the point, if their competitors manage to achieve #3 or #4, at what long-term cost to Spotify?

You left off:

5. Cut your losses and keep whatever cash stores you can for the storm to come.

We have zero insight into what the Spotify execs are seeing. Maybe ad revenue is already down. Maybe subscriptions aren’t renewing. Maybe costs are increasing.

Sometimes, the best thing to do is cut some employees now, so you don’t have to cut more later.

They should feel good, because their capitalist machine has done just what it has aspired to do - get people to spend money they don't have:

https://apnews.com/article/spending-consumers-inflation-econ...

That's peak capitalism right there - you've got people spending to buy products with money borrowed from credit card companies and banks, which they will have difficulty paying off and will pay a good amount of interest on.

If you can't make a company work in that environment, you might want to do a bit of a self examination and notice that your advertising is annoying and off-putting and your web-browser based client is utter shit.

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