4 ms·

Good grief, what the heck does Spotify do with 3000+ employees?

fs111 9y ago
burn money?
Kurtz79 9y ago
Definitely 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 ago
  They 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 ago
Last 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 ago
  You should really count the Premium (paying) users only. The others don't make the company any money.
  - selectodude 9y ago
    50 million paid users, 140 million total users. https://press.spotify.com/us/about/ https://press.spotify.com/us/about/
  - roberto 9y ago
    They do by listening to ads.
    - jackmodern 9y ago
      not 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 ago
  The 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.

burn money?

Definitely 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 ago
They 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 ago

Last 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 ago
You should really count the Premium (paying) users only. The others don't make the company any money.
- selectodude 9y ago
  50 million paid users, 140 million total users. https://press.spotify.com/us/about/ https://press.spotify.com/us/about/
- roberto 9y ago
  They do by listening to ads.
  - jackmodern 9y ago
    not 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 ago
The 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.