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Comment by jononomo | Hacker News Reader

For the life of me I can't understand why Spotify would need more than 3,000 employees.

Revenue per employee is $1.6M before the cuts. Thats efficient.

https://markets.ft.com/data/equities/tearsheet/profile?s=SPO...

For normal tech companies with low marginal costs sure. Spotify pays 70% of revenue straight to labels though, they need far more revenue per employee than normal tech companies to make the math work.

But what are the costs because looking back it seems they are well into the negative earnings per share.

Look at the financial reports, 70+% of the revenue pays out in royalties. Those are the main cost.

It's an interesting question. I guess they are mostly sales or support people, which need to be scaled linearly to a number of customers, labels, artists, etc.

I guess people misinterpreted the parent's statement. Spotify had 9,000 employees and downsized to 7,500. I think downsizing to 3,000 is a quite reasonable ask.

As the owner of the site previously known as twitter showed - once you are out of the hockey stick phase you could do with a lot less than anyone thought possible.

By doing a lot less than anyone expected.

Which is a fair opinion, but how's that 3,000 break down? Are they all coders or salespeople or...?

I could write Spotify in like a weekend or two tops! I don't see the need for all that dead weight. Personally, I don't like coding mobile apps, so idk maybe hire like 2 people (1 Android and 1 iOS) dev for that. I'll do the backend. Easy savings really.

See also "I could rewrite curl": https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2021/05/20/i-could-rewrite-curl/

I can't even tell if this is parody. I, too, can write an app in a weekend that streams nothing because I own no servers, no disks, and have no licensing agreements with rights holders allowing me to host and serve any of the content they own. Surely, writing the app is all there is to this business.

It probably says a lot about tech people if my comment, that obviously is wrong on every level, is taken this seriously. :)

Poe's law strikes again!

This a play on the classic Dropbox/rsync comment?

Exactly!

I think you are right in a way. The hard part of spotify is getting the deals and the labels and the users. It is not a technology marvel.

> The hard part of spotify is getting the deals and the labels and the users.

Having worked for a (now defunct) company that was trying to get labels onboard, this is exactly correct. They had 3 or 4 people (plus the founders) who mostly spent all day chasing up music industry contacts and lawyers trying to get them into conversations and persuading them to license their content. And having had to deal with CWRs and ERNs, that's also a nightmare of hideous proportions you have to deal with for streaming services.

sounds like you have a plan! go for it!

This sounds like sarcasm, but it's missing the /s and the context of the parent post doesn't make sense for it to be sarcastic.

2000 lawyers, 500 devs, and 500 admin?

They had thousands of engineers alone. Many years ago, Spotify adopted the infamous "squad" model where each individual UI element or feature would have a dedicated team of 6-8 developers, designers, and PMs. Each of these teams would be organized into higher level groups with yet more cooperation staff, and so-on for a couple more levels. Add on all the people making tools for developers, admin, the thousands of additional people to deal with the music industry/sales and yeah, not hard to see where the headcount came from.

They changed structure a couple years back, but headcount didn't really go down.

Wait until you find out how many employees DocuSign has...

(It is literally 10 times more than you would think.)

My understanding is that docusign has a massive sales department. Does spotify even need any sales people?

According to their career page, DocuSign has 77 open roles in engineering. That's feels like a lot, but given they have identify verification where each country has nuances, maybe there's a lot going on behind the scenes.

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