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How does this compare to Spotify which has 3000+ employees, debt financing of over a billion dollars, and an insane valuation? What does the future hold for tha
by jopie 9y ago
How does this compare to Spotify which has 3000+ employees, debt financing of over a billion dollars, and an insane valuation? What does the future hold for that company whether it IPOs or not?
- DigitalJack 9y agoGood grief, what the heck does Spotify do with 3000+ employees?
- fs111 9y agoburn money?
- Kurtz79 9y agoDefinitely NOT making a mobile app with decent UI. Jokes aside, having to negotiate with tons of artists and their labels/managers, I imagine their legal/business department is significantly bigger than that of most tech startups.
- bogomipz 9y agoThey negotiate with very few artists and their managers directly. The reason is that there are very few artists who have that kind of control of their content. AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles and Taylor Swift come to mind, but there are very few artists who have a say in whether or not their catalog can or can not be streamed. Those artists made wise business decisions at some point and/or were able to throw their weight around. Here are some notable hold outs as of 2016 anyway: https://consequenceofsound.net/2016/02/which-artists-are-still-holding-out-on-streaming/ https://consequenceofsound.net/2016/02/which-artists-are-sti... Using Pink Floyd as an example, the decision was there's and not their record label EMI: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/pink-floyd-catalog-arrives-on-spotify-20130617 http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/pink-floyd-catalog-ar...
- glogla 9y agoLast time I checked, Spotify had 70 million users. That's one employee per 23333 users. Is that too much? How many thousands users should you have per employee? Because if they want to have support at all (unlike, say, Google), they need quite a few employees.
- dullgiulio 9y agoYou should really count the Premium (paying) users only. The others don't make the company any money.
- selectodude 9y ago50 million paid users, 140 million total users. https://press.spotify.com/us/about/ https://press.spotify.com/us/about/
- roberto 9y agoThey do by listening to ads.
- jackmodern 9y agonot much. when I interviewed with them the PM director told me the radio listeners were near break even, if they gave people free trials then it was 100% a loss that was costing them money.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Dylan16807 9y agoThe per-user costs here are web servers and customer support. The bulk of the servers are only doing one thing, so even though there are a lot of them, you could mange them with a hundred people. So that leaves customer service as a per-user cost. It's possible that the customer support department has 2000+ people, and that would be a satisfactory answer. But if that's not the case, then "employees per user" is pretty irrelevant, and the question stands.
- jdavis703 9y agoThere's a lot that goes on behind the scenes. You need sales people to sell ads, designers to build out the creatives (assuming the company you sold ads for doesn't have media that fits with your platform). Then you need account executives to manage the account. Then you need a billing department that collects the money. Then you need engineering to build out your ad serving abilities. For IT you have the core that builds what some here have called a "shitty" UI. Then you have people working on all kinds of invisible things like developer tools to support releases. People working on recommendation engines. People working on instrumenting data and metrics for business analysts. Then you have people who hand-curate music for each of the markets and local tastes that Spotify operates in. Then you need people to manage these people... Etc.