29 ms·

Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%

• honeybadger1 4y ago
  Another company turning off the peacocking and turning on the dominant business practices culture that makes them great to begin with.
• mikebonnell 4y ago
  Spotify lays off 6% of the workforce.
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
    Spotify fucked up and makes good by firing 6% of their people.
• Dave3of5 4y ago
  More doom and gloom. Last few years have been terrible.
  • nemo44x 4y ago
    Yeah we seem to have had hit our industry peak in November 2021.
    • qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
      Strange memories on this nervous night in Palo Alto. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle twenties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . . History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened. My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . . There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . . And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . . So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”
      • dbspin 4y ago
        Watched the Gimme Shelter documentary last night and it made me wonder if, when Thompson wrote that piece, he wasn't merely being allegorical. Perhaps he was also referencing the Altamonte Speedway which is North West of Vegas as the crow flies and where in a sense the 'sixties' came to a very definite end.
  • mrweasel 4y ago
    There's still a ton of jobs out there, depending on where in the world you're able to work. They might not be as exciting, the companies aren't as well known, but they still pay fairly well and it's stable. I do feel bad for those who are losing their jobs, it's not their fault. Many of the companies currently firing people simply had too many employees to begin with. Daniel Elk even admits it: "I was too ambitious in investing ahead of our revenue growth".
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • nivenkos 4y ago
      It really depends where, outside the US pay is pretty terrible usually. In Europe for example, as a senior developer you get maybe $70-90k in FAANG and big companies, and $50-70k in smaller companies.
      • mrweasel 4y ago
        It's a little hard to compare across countries in Europe, even within a small country. I'm in Denmark, but outside Copenhagen. $90.000 isn't a terrible salary and $100.000 is pretty doable for a senior developer, dev-ops or operation person. You can go a bit higher in Copenhagen. That's not for the FAANGs, that's for the companies that a desperately looking for employees. Other countries have much lower cost of living, so I don't see the issue with saleries being lower in those countries. Again very much depending on which country you're in, I'd say that $50.000 is a starting salary, perhaps on the low-end, for a developer fresh out of school.
    • danjac 4y ago
      What's weird is that all of these CEOs are saying the same thing: "I hired too many folks a couple years ago, welp, guess I was wrong". You would think some companies hired too many, some hired too few, others more or less just stayed the same. Instead we're seeing this groupthink of these so-called geniuses of the industry moving this way and that like a flock of sheep.
• hugs_vs_toph 4y ago
  I hope they fired their UX guy, at least the interface would stop its descent into hell (Cianide 1994)
  • dvngnt_ 4y ago
    I've never had an issue with Spotifys ux
    • yesimahuman 4y ago
      Yea it’s the kind of thing you deliberately don’t want to see changed. Never had an issue. Now, if my DW would stop playing songs I’ve heard hundreds of times, that would be appreciated!
    • gadders 4y ago
      The app is terrible. No consistent route for the "back" button - constantly doesn't do what I expect. No clear way to find a history of songs you'd played before. App notifications for new podcast episodes never take you to that episode. In patchy wifi/4g it takes forever to start or search, rather than finding local results first.
    • bachmeier 4y ago
      Just a couple that hit me all the time: - Click the play button. Nothing happens. Reload the page. Hit the play button. Nothing happens. Reload the page a second time. Hit the play button. With some delay, it finally starts to play. - My own playlists are buried underneath their insane recommendations. Want to know which songs I'm most likely to want to listen to? A good place to start would be the ones I put on my playlist. I think their recommendation system was designed by an intern that trained a deep learning model on 6 observations. Then the intern left, and nobody knew how to fix it.
    • phailhaus 4y ago
      Have you ever tried to deal with playlists and queues? It's a nightmare. Way too easy to accidentally play a song rather than queue it up, and simple requests like "I'd like to queue up this song in the middle of this album/playlist" are too confusing. Run into issues constantly on road trips or at parties.
• traceroute66 4y ago
  Might I suggest "Spotify" be retrospectively added to the title ? The present generic "An update on January 2023 Organisational Changes" is very unhelpful. And indeed has already lead to at least one duplicate post ...
  • filleokus 4y ago
    I changed it to the most relevant/interesting snippet from the post and added "Spotify: " before it. Maybe too much editorialising for HN? But it feels more informative to me.
• ttrrooppeerr 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • wreath 4y ago
    You can't stand, not even listening, but having opposed views sharing tenancy in the same software as where your music is?
    • phatfish 4y ago
      Not just sharing the same "software". If the parent has a paid Spotify subscription they are directly funding his podcast. Admittedly there are probably other podcasts they might not like too, but Joe is certainly the biggest ass on platform and got a mountain of subscriber money for the exclusive deal.
      • default_png 4y ago
        Biggest Asset on the platform as well.. That exclusivity deal definitely retains people to Spotify.
      • wreath 4y ago
        how exactly is he an ass? He brings in people he likes to talk to. They spit out bullshit sometimes, interesting stuff other times. He happens to record those conversations and make shit ton of money out of them. I'm sure there are far whorse podcasts and content online and on Spotify (a lot of black metal is straight up racist shit yet its on Spotify). Rogan gets shit for being the archetype of everything the left hates.
  • honeybadger1 4y ago
    Just turn off your internet services if you don't want to fund differing points of view.
    • paulcole 4y ago
      You can be OK funding differing points of view but not OK funding a specific differing point of view.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• flohofwoe 4y ago
  > Ostroff helped shape Spotify's podcast business... If that means that they're paddling back on shoving that podcast bullshit into your face and return to focusing on music streaming, then there's at least a silver lining. Reading how podcasts have higher "engagement" that's probably wishful thinking though.
• mercwear 4y ago
  12.184B in revenue for 2022 and they are still cutting headcount, another tech company who could not care less about it's employees.
  • survirtual 4y ago
    They do it because they can. Because most employees are spineless and will fall in line. People making the money we make in the tech industry should be living well below their means, saving, and supplanting the tech giants with worker-owned coops and guilds. If all tech workers united into guilds the corps would come begging us for technical contributions, and we would collectively charge up the ass for it — and all make 100% of the profits.
    • coldpie 4y ago
      I agree. However, it's easy to post on HN, and much harder to do in practice. Do keep us posted if you make some progress in this direction. (This isn't sarcasm, I'm genuinely interested in that model.)
      • survirtual 4y ago
        Agreed. Generally, I think that the strategy will be some combination of technology, coop ownership, and worker insurance. Technology, for making corporation killers. Making alternative tech stacks that make existing corporate offerings irrelevant and requiring a sort of ransom to keep the licenses non-competitive. This provides nuclear leverage. Cooperative ownership to align the organizations objectives with individual workers. The profit is distributed in a relatively fair way without these 100x pay differences, in a manner members can all agree with, and planets away from only caring about enriching investors. Worker insurance where the coop offers healthcare and minimum income guarantees between jobs with corps. When a member is working for a corp, it is expected the corp pays for their insurance etc. If the member leaves the corp, they seamlessly continue to have healthcare etc. I think the first step to making something like this happen is creating an extremely valuable piece of tech that society cannot do without. That acts as a beacon to attract workers and provides leverage. With the appropriate legal framework around that, it would cascade from there.
• krono 4y ago
  No mention of who is taking full responsibility for the situation! Edit: The CEO takes full "accountability" instead, further down the original announcement[0] [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230123124201/https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-01-23/an-update-on-january-2023-organizational-changes/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230123124201/https://newsroom....
  • halgir 4y ago
    The actual statement by Ek contains: "I take full accountability for the moves that got us here today." Interestingly, responsibility is usually used as a get-out-of-jail-free phrase, while accountability literally means that you will take consequences. Maybe I'm just reading too much into the literal meaning of otherwise similar words.
    • jungong 4y ago
      [dead]
    • michaelmior 4y ago
      The dictionary definition of accountable says nothing about consequences. From Merriam-Webster 1) subject to giving an account : answerable 2) capable of being explained : explainable
      • halgir 4y ago
        You're right. Though checking their synonym guide [1], there is this: > accountable suggests imminence of retribution for unfulfilled trust or violated obligation. [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/accountable https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/accountable
      • marcosdumay 4y ago
        It sure does imply consequences. Click on that link in "answerable".
        • 4y ago
• gadders 4y ago
  I got asked to do a survey when I opened the Spotify app last week. All the questions were of a "What would you do if this price rise happened?" and most of the varieties had the family plan going to £20.99. I don't know what they are smoking to think that they're worth more than a Netflix subscription. Video > audio. If they put the family plan price up I'll cancel it and use Prime Music or something.
  • halgir 4y ago
    > Video > audio I get what you mean, but I wouldn't accept that as a universal truth. I spend considerably more time listening to music on Spotify than I do watching video on Netflix. The content I consume on Netflix may have cost more to produce, but the content I consume on Spotify gives me subjectively more value.
    • SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      I agree with you - music keeps me entertained all day, it has far more value to me. But isn't there an argument to be made that the infrastructure requirements for video is huge compared to music? The requirements to store and stream enough 4k video all day every day to satisfy millions of users is monstrous and that has to factor into the cost. I wouldn't expect streaming audio to be nearly that costly.
      • halgir 4y ago
        The only reason music streaming is so cheap is because it's a commodity. There's several multi-billion dollar corporations all competing with largely identical products. There's not much else than price to compete on. Video services compete on exclusive content, so they can make subjective value considerations around how valuable certain content is to certain groups.
        • ghaff 4y ago
          And, related is that there's a royalty/copyright structure in music that means those multi-billion dollar companies can stream almost anything they want for a known low dollar amount. There's also an almost infinite supply of good music--past and present--out there. There just isn't a lot of incentive for most audio streaming services to invest in exclusive content--the odd podcast notwithstanding.
• dataengineer56 4y ago
  The Spotify app constantly frustrates me and I miss the old Google Play Music app. - I listened to 5 minutes of one episode of a podcast once, decided it wasn't for me and stopped, but ever since then I have an entire pane on my homepage dedicated to my apparent love for that podcast. - The first 4 sections of the homepage recommend me exactly the same things - I have the last 6 albums I listened to at the top, then "Jump back in", then "Recently played" and then "Recommended for today". There's no "here's some stuff you haven't listened to lately". I regularly enjoy an album, burn myself out on it (because it's always presented to me), don't listen to it for a week and then completely forget about it because Spotify never mentions it again. - The queuing functionality is horrible. There's way to add a new album to the end of the current queue. That means I have to consciously realise that I'm listening to the last song of an album and then queue up what I want to listen to next. It regularly gets confused especially if I connect it to a Bluetooth device mid-album, and will sometime decide to truncate my queue, chopping off the last few songs of an album or repeating a middle few songs that I've already listened to. How can such a simple concept (listen to music) get so many basics so wrong and have such glaring bugs?
  • hadrien01 4y ago
    For your second point, there's a Time Capsule playlist with content you haven't recently listened to.
    • dataengineer56 4y ago
      I listen to albums, not songs, and looking at that playlist then there's a lot of stuff there that I've never listened to and have no desire to listen to. Spotify seems exceptionally bad at metal music and says "oh you listen to prog metal? Then you're definitely going to love us constantly recommending you the exact same Korn, Slipknot and blink-182 albums".
  • jerpint 4y ago
    The most frustrating for me is the way the “offline” feature works. On my android, even though I had downloaded songs/podcasts/etc. I had to dig in settings and set it explicitly to offline mode to enable offline playback. Another grievance: I love music and podcasts and use Spotify for both. It would be great to have a podcast tab and a music tab. Instead, if you switch from one to the other, you’ll have to dig out the previous episode you were listening to. Very user unfriendly
• eigen-vector 4y ago
  This is probably the least tactical message amongst all the companies that have laid off people. Ek's spent most of the time rambling about efficiency and organizational changes to leadership positions who'll be least affected by the layoffs. Then comes the layoff news. It's almost as if he's rectifying someone else's mistake and everyone getting laid off should be thankful about it. I wish CEOs read some of the emails that recruiting sends to potential candidates before they set out to write a layoff post. Completely tone deaf.
  • mjburgess 4y ago
    It always helps to remember that people, generically, are idiots who don't mean to say what, literally, they say; have no idea how to say what they mean; and are otherwise just struggling to create an impression of being in control and knowing whats going on. The first paragraph of this article reads this way to me: a person flinging around cliches because they've no idea what they're supposed to say, or how to say it. This, indeed, may be more acute if the author is actually distressed.
    • eigen-vector 4y ago
      I'd be more empathetic if this was a response in a live Q&A like situation. For something that's meant to be PR speak, this is abysmal.
  • mahathu 4y ago
    >I wish CEOs read some of the emails that recruiting sends to potential candidates before they set out to write a layoff post. Completely tone deaf. What kind of emails are you referring to? I haven't worked at a tech company in a long while
  • ErikVandeWater 4y ago
    Yeah, starting of a note about layoffs talking "reiterating" about the "most defensible business strategy" is extremely tone-deaf.
  • defaultcompany 4y ago
• erdaniels 4y ago
  Unrelated but, does anyone have a good universal solution of what music you "like" or "own"? I want to move off of Spotify but I want to make sure all my music is playable from some platform or locally. A decade ago I moved off the good iTunes and foolishly lost my complete library of metadata of songs, so I want to avoid that again.
  • skydhash 4y ago
    Scrobbles through Last.fm? But I don't think you can export directly from Spotify (maybe through playlist and one of the music transfer tools? I mostly use Spotify to listen through a recommended album. And ads bother me, so I switched to premium (It's 2.99 for me). I have a local library of ALAC albums that I like. I used Syncthing to sync it to my home server, where there is a Plex installation (When I want to play via the ATV). And I convert to AAC 256kbps to my iPhone (Bluetooth is lossy anyway). More hassle than playing via Spotify, but the latter's UX is so bad that it's worth it. Also I have some excellent headphones (Hifiman Sundara and Sennheiser 6XX).
    • ascagnel_ 4y ago
      While Plex has some shortfalls with handling music (mostly that most tags are applied at the album level, not the track level), it's still the best option I've tried for handling your own streaming setup. The PlexAmp[0] app they developed sands off many of the rougher UX elements from the web app, but it requires a paid version of the Plex server. [0] https://plexamp.com https://plexamp.com
  • SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    When you say "own" what do you mean? CD's? Or some digital purchase? I believe modern iTunes is DRM free so you can keep all your purchases safe that way. Alternatively Youtube Music allows you to upload all your local music so you can their service to stream it. I've bought things on iTunes and then uploaded them to Youtube Music.
    • erdaniels 4y ago
• theusus 4y ago
  Jesus fucking christ
• layer8 4y ago
  Gotta love these euphemisms, “reducing our employee base”.
  • mkl95 4y ago
    I can see it being used to imply that these are full time Spotify employees, since they hire some contractors.
  • joegahona 4y ago
    Right? Surprised they didn't use "adjusting" instead of "reducing" to make it even more opaque.
  • adingus 4y ago
    Another one I love is "right sizing". A phrase I have only ever heard when companies lay off.
• mcdonje 4y ago
  I switched to Tidal and have been pleased so far. It's not perfect, but it is focused on music, has a pretty good interface, and pays artists better than Spotify does. Reasons I was unhappy with Spotify: - They went all in on podcasts at the expense of the music interface. Too many little design choices trying to steer me into podcasts when I'm there for music. - Their podcast strategy relies on leveraging their market position instead of adding value to the market. - Trying to replicate Patreon - Buying up a catalog of exclusive podcasts - Not going to respond to any comments about this point, but the Joe Rogan thing left a sour taste in my mouth as well. In addition to other aspects of that debacle, it was not a sound business strategy. The podcast app I use (PocketCasts) is generally pretty good, but it has enough annoyances that I thought I might as well try to switch and get all of my podcasts on Spotify. I couldn't get special Patreon feeds because Spotify doesn't support them. The reason is they want to roll out their own Patreon-like podcast payments mechanism. But as of when I left, they had not rolled it out across the board, and the podcasts I listen to were not supported. I'm not sure what their value proposition to podcast producers is that would get them to switch from Patreon to Spotify, but I imagine that has something to do with the trouble rolling that out. I don't recall the details, but I wasn't all that impressed with the Spotify podcast functionality as a user either. If they spent money on paying musicians more instead of podcasters, made a podcast app worth using, and played nicely with the podcasting sphere, I probably would've stayed with them. They got big because they solved problems. Then they shifted their strategy to leveraging their market position instead of solving problems. A sure sign a company has lost its way.
• jzb 4y ago
  I dunno, maybe if Spotify wasn't spending hundreds of million on podcast deals and actually focusing on what its users want, they wouldn't need to lay people off. Any way you slice it, there's no way that the Rogan deal pays for itself. Spotify is stingy AF with the artists that drove people to the service, and then firehoses Rogan with cash and tries to shove podcasts down people's throats. I was a happy Spotify subscriber for a long time but they just kept making the service worse while ratcheting up prices.
  • nivenkos 4y ago
    But Spotify doesn't pay the artists directly, the deals are with the record companies. The real issue here seems to be over-hiring and a lot of acquisitions for all sorts of marginal stuff like video podcasts, audiobooks, etc.
  • missedthecue 4y ago
    If they don't have enough work for their workforce, would you still say they're morally obligated to keep writing paychecks?
    • jjulius 4y ago
      >If they don't have enough work for their workforce, would you still say they're morally obligated to keep writing paychecks? Where does OP say that Spotify is "morally obligated to keep writing paychecks"?
      • missedthecue 4y ago
        He didn't, hence why my comment has a question mark.
        • jjulius 4y ago
          >He didn't... >... would you still say...
    • sarchertech 4y ago
• nrook 4y ago
  The tide is turning; tech owners are attempting to curtail the high costs of labor in the software industry. The only way for labor to fight back is to stand together and form a union.
  • nivenkos 4y ago
    Outside the US, labour costs are already quite low though. Although I agree, they're going to get even lower. To quote Neal Stephenson: > the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity
  • paulcole 4y ago
    Isn’t it possible that the high costs just aren’t sustainable for businesses that just don’t make any money?
  • gfdsgfsdgfs 4y ago
    Unions often have coasters and quiet quitters. As an experienced developer I would never work with people like that.
    • MAGZine 4y ago
      you'd rather work harder and for less money than work with people who phone it in? I don't really buy the meritocracy argument that 'good devs get paid more'. It hasn't really panned out in my experience, except for less than 1%, probably closer to .1% of devs who are really, truly exceptional AND will fight aggressively for their keep.
      • SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
        I would rather, yes. Working with people who phone it in means my projects will unpredictably grind to a halt for weeks, and getting them to work at all requires an obnoxious and overbearing management style that I really don't enjoy being around. I don't think it's wrong to be a "phone it in" person, they're just trying to earn a living so they can focus on what they care about, but that doesn't mean I want to work with them.
• gruez 4y ago
  more discussion (80 comments as of this posting) here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34488121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34488121
• mkl95 4y ago
  Worth noting that Spotify has less than 7000 employees so that 6% will be ~400 employees. Terrible news for those affected, but it would take many more to affect the industry the way FAANG layoffs do.
• polygotdomain 4y ago
  I think we've gotten into this weird spot where tech companies are almost goading each other into layoffs. I don't doubt that there was some overexpansion during COVID, but it seems to have shifted. Tech companies have signaled to the market that staffing numbers were too high (regardless of profitability), and that investors want to see them brought back down. These layoffs don't really seem to be an indication of company strength, and the golden parachutes that a lot of these companies are offering can't really be that helpful to the bottom line (5mo + unused PTO + benefits in this case for Spotify). It's just playing things up for a certain audience while the general public is largely distracted.
  • cbm-vic-20 4y ago
    If not goading, they're at least providing some cover for each other. If a company is looking to cut some percentage of staff, it's best to tuck that into the news cycle when many of your peers are doing the same thing.
  • tootie 4y ago
    I think everyone trying to attribute some kind of 4D chess maneuvers to these actions is massively overestimating tech CEOs.
    • ryandrake 4y ago
      A previous HN article called them "copycat layoffs"[1] which makes the most sense. This is reactive panic from "leaders" looking at each other for hints of what to do. A lot of companies determine their product and engineering strategies this way too. An exercise to the reader: Think about the major decisions your company has made since you've joined... How much of it was simply because competitors or bigger example companies were also doing it? EDIT: 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34480314 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34480314
    • pm90 4y ago
      It’s not a deliberate plan but more like FOMO. It seems reasonable that execs hang out in similar social groups and have similar viewpoints and predictions. Once a specific idea has taken hold, company leadership has to either fight it or give in.
• EastSmith 4y ago
  Just learned that Spotify made all the private playlist (along the playlist' label) public. Someone posted about it the other thread for the same news. I am shocked.
  • mh- 4y ago
    I don't see them visible on my profile, as of now, but my profile also doesn't seem to be loading reliably. I can confirm that private playlists are accessible by their link even in an incognito window. That is surprising to me. Has that always been the case? edit: a quick google suggests that sharing by link is known to allow access to anyone with the link.
• ben7799 4y ago
  I've seen some good analyses lately showing spotify's business model just can't survive in the long run with the way things are going in the economy and the record companies are squeezing them while simultaneously maneuvering to own them/buy them over time. Apple/Amazon/Google are diversified giants that can seemingly get away with running things without a need to make as much money as Spotify/Tidal/Whatever which just do music/podcast streaming. In the long run these services are all unsustainable and bad for music.. I sometimes wonder if the young people going back to vinyl is somewhat of a pushback on how lame the entire experience of using these streaming services can be. Podcasts can do well and have done well for a very long time in a small business model with sponsors & product promotion.. throwing massive money at them has always seemed an odd choice.
  • default_png 4y ago
    Thing is though, I have probably thrown 3K into Spotify, If I cant get a "Flat rate subscription for All / Most of the music out there" - > I will 100% just go back to downloading discographies of the artists I like. People saying "Support the artists" - I don't care about the artists, I just want to listen to whatever takes my fancy, and if they can't do that at my price point, they will end up getting nothing from me..
    • mrsuprawsm 4y ago
      how have you spent $3k on Spotify? the company is 17 years old and if you were subscribing from day 1 for $10/month that would only be 2k.
      • BlackjackCF 4y ago
        OP probably just ballpark estimated… but you can certainly have spent $3k on Spotify since they now allow you to buy audiobooks.
      • default_png 4y ago
        Been using it since I was back at Uni, 2012, and have paid for both myself and another account recently.
• phamilton4 4y ago
  I get needing to keep a company lean and that businesses operate to make money... But most of these recent layoffs really make me feel uneasy. Spotify is a little different because AFAIK they are still operating at a negative net income, but still let's take a look at this. They're going to let go 600 people.. that's maybe an annual 90 million in savings (150k salary). The company's revenue is about 9 billion with -39 million in net income. So while this move might take them into the positive net income, it's still only going to save them what? 0.1% of their revenue. I realize it's much more complex than this, but I have been looking at it this way for nearly every recent headline/company and the savings are never really that significant. I'm not saying that people who don't contribute or people who are bad employees should be kept around forever because the company is healthy. I'm just observing the financial "cost" of these laid off employees compared against the companies revenue/net income. Having been at a company that's doing layoffs and surviving multiple rounds of layoffs myself, the impact (in my opinion) on the remaining employees is quite significant. I have seen people constantly frustrated with losing team members, managers leaving once a few of their employees have left, good employees finding other employment, etc. I'm not sure what I would do in these companies positions, but it seems strange to just cut your workforce when the trend has been going up financially for your company. These types of layoffs just create negative, especially with the current state of the world. Are any of the board members taking a salary cut? Are any of the C level's taking a cut? end rant, I need to get back to work so this doesn't happen to me.
  • overgard 4y ago
    Considering how generous the severance is (a good thing), I wonder if it will even save them much money this year (granted, there will probably be some resignations from people that disagree with the direction).
    • mason55 4y ago
      > I wonder if it will even save them much money this year They also get to account for it differently. The severance payments can be written off as a one-time charge, so from that perspective they get to take the GAAP benefits this year. Even though the cash flow is ~the same between letting people work for a year and then laying them off with no severance, doing it this way makes the business immediately look better.
• RSHEPP 4y ago
  Sounds like a great time to reduce my monthly payments to Spotify by 100%. I overspent during the past two years and based on the macro economic conditions I need to increase my personal finance efficiency.
  • whymauri 4y ago
    But do you take full accountability?
• shantara 4y ago
  It feels like a pure bandwagon action, and not one that was well thought out and came from the organization’s needs. To give one data point, I have a friend who just joined Spotify and had his first working day last week.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• htrp 4y ago
  50 million charge for 600 jobs, average of 83k for severance....
• ajaimk 4y ago
  Can a mod rename this: sounds like base salary is being reduced by 6%
  • Kiro 4y ago
    Don't tell mods to change something if you're not sure what you're talking about. Base here refers to people, 600 to be exact, so it sounds like you're wrong.
    • nsteel 4y ago
      I think you've misunderstood the parent comment. They were saying the current title could be misinterpreted to mean "base salary is being reduced by 6%". I didn't think that, but I can see where they are coming from.
      • Ekaros 4y ago
        That was my first skim on it as well. Which to me sounded horrible considering inflation rates.
      • Kiro 4y ago
        Ah, you're probably right and my comment is stupid in that context. I apologize.
• woeirua 4y ago
  This is an unpopular opinion, but history from the DotCom crash tells us that the layoffs are just getting started. Turns out you can’t run at a loss forever, and when the going gets rough the fastest way to increase profitability is to cut costs. Say what you will about Elon and Twitter, but he definitely proved that the majority of the engineers at Twitter were adding no value to the company. That is probably true at _all_ of the large tech companies. If you work at a tech company make sure you have at least 6 months of liquid savings set aside for a rainy day.
  • RomanPushkin 4y ago
    What did he prove? First, the effect is going to be visible long-term. Second, they're hiring as hell. For example, they have reached out to me, and I spoke with recruiters just to understand what's going on a little bit better. So yes, they're hiring people now. What he proved is that when you fire, you hire immediately (but secretly).
  • Loughla 4y ago
    Outside looking in - it appeared that large tech companies were hiring a billion engineers just so they had them. Like safety in redundancy, and if you were employing the best and the brightest, they couldn't make a product that undercut you. I guess now's the time to start undercutting?
  • qbasic_forever 4y ago
    The companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. also having major layoffs are not and have not been running at a loss for a long time. Most of these layoffs are driven by shareholder demand. I suspect this will be a bit like 2008 where tech companies pulled back and then realized it was a huge mistake and went on hiring sprees again after a year. Twitter just posted a 40% or so reduction in income this quarter. It seems way too early to say they didn't need all the people they laid off. From everything I see their ad revenue is cratering from poor targeting, reliability, etc.
  • mjr00 4y ago
    I don't think "the majority of the engineers at Twitter were adding no value to the company" is a fair statement: one because it's not clear that it was the majority, two because it wasn't necessarily "no value" as much as "not as much value as other product areas", and three because it wasn't just engineering, it's product managers, sales, marketing, community managers, everyone. That being said I do think Elon's bold moves at Twitter sent a shock through the industry. It made executives reevaluate their company's business strategies and if the non-core-business functions actually even made sense. Why is Google making a cloud gaming service, much less funding a video game studio? Why is Twitter employing people to debunk climate change? Why is Amazon employing a team of people to write jokes for their unprofitable smart home device? Corporate bloat has been common forever, but it's been especially common over the past decade with zero interest rates. There's been basically zero focus on expenses and 100% focus on growth at all costs. Scary part is we might just be getting started. Maybe we will see 50% cuts at Google/Meta/Amazon by the end of the year.
• capableweb 4y ago
  As a long time user of Spotify (almost two decades in a couple of years...), this is my biggest gripe with Spotify: https://i.imgur.com/wfSka2H.png https://i.imgur.com/wfSka2H.png More and more playlists are starting to look like this, which is starting to piss me off. I don't really care if it's the record companies fault or whoever, and I blame 100% myself for getting into this situation in the first place. Started to use Bandcamp more and more lately, and feel a lot safer because of it. I'm hopeful Bandcamp won't ever need to do layoffs either, as they are not trying to take over the world with their SaaS or pivot to focusing on Podcasts, or stuff like that. But Spotify was really useful for a long time and still discovery is second to none.
  • yawnr 4y ago
    Well they’re owned by Epic now, so that may not be up to them anymore.
    • capableweb 4y ago
      That did suck big time, makes them less independent. But at least stuff I already bought and downloaded can't disappear overnight, as I have the files on disk and backup already. I learned something from Spotify after all :)
  • dmitriid 4y ago
    > I don't really care if it's the record companies fault or whoever, and I blame 100% myself for getting into this situation in the first place. Interestingly that in a situation where it's 100% copyright holders who are at fault, you say that you 100% blame yourself, but in reality you blame Spotify be cause that's your biggest gripe with it. Somehow no one ever blames the three-four companies (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry#Consolidation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry#Consolidation) that hold 90% of the world's recorded music hostage.
  • npteljes 4y ago
    Yeah this is what we get for relying on streaming. After 10 months of YouTube Music, I just noticed my first disappeared track. Funny thing is, the track is found in the service, just disappeared from my playlist and the album art seems a bit different. Time to create a job that saves at least the tracklists.
• esskay 4y ago
  So based on the rate of feature releases and bugfixes, this will take the active development team down from 2 guys and a dog to 1 guy and a dog.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• fulltimeloser 4y ago
  I hope we can keep companies like original Spotify around, where I can find almost all the music I want to listen to. I wish companies could keep a limited scope for their offerings and just be really good at just that. Spotify's focus on pod cast is kind of crap. It's like TV eras cheap production value reality shows from late 1990ths all over. I guess the capitalist mantra of perpetual growth is leading them down another path. Netflix used to be my go to site for film, now there are so many to streaming services choose from I don't know where to start. And they mainly focus on making series, which I'm not a big fan of. Looks like Spotify will follow the money and hollow out their original service to be another junk site for vapid entertainment and easy money.
  • werds 4y ago
    I would happily see Spotify die, they have exploited the artists more effectively than any other organization since the advent of streaming.
  • dmitriid 4y ago
    Both Spotify and Netflix depend on content that they don't, and can't, own. Netflix became a desert after WB, Disney and others decided they wanted their own streaming services and took their content with them. And since Disney basically owns everything, Netflix now has nothing (except their own content). Spotify is fully at the mercy of the three-four big companies that own nearly all the music in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry#Consolidation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_industry#Consolidation And don't forget, you also need to complete with companies with near-unlimited money and quick access to users like Apple, Google, Amazon
• AlwaysRock 4y ago
  Weird wording for layoffs.
• type0 4y ago
  Can they compete with Deezer for audio quality or will they also be reducing that by 6%?
• Ekaros 4y ago
  Lot of talk about productivity. But I really wonder with companies like Spotify. Shouldn't they be at this point pretty mature? And is there really value looking for the next moonshot or big win? Did they actually even need the pool of engineers they had? There is always maintenance and keeping things running, making them better, but how much greenfield work would there be in short term?
• netheril96 4y ago
  When I read the title "Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%", I thought Spotify was reducing the base compensation of all employees instead of laying people off. How wrong I was.
• hsavit1 4y ago
  Another "I take full accountability for the moves that got us here today." message from the CEO. What does this accountability mean? Shouldn't he be fired and stripped of all benefits, just as he did for those employees that got axed?
  • andsoitis 4y ago
    > What does this accountability mean? It means to own up to one’s mistake and fixing it. It isn’t that mysterious.
• shadowtree 4y ago
  The core question is how many employees do you need run a stable internet business? Stable means no massive new product lines, growth, etc. Spotify is what it is. An app across a handful platforms, streaming infrastructure, and a legal/purchasing dept for music rights. Does this need 7000 people? Zero chance. Is it 1000? 700? 250? No ones knows yet, but everyone remembers WhatsApp at acquisition and watches Twitter to kind of continue without 80% of its former employee base.
  • steviesands 4y ago
    If your goal is maintenance mode for the company, milk profits for 10 years, and to be eventually replaced by competitors then I think you can run a company very slim. The other question would be, if you have captured a large market share (100s of M/yr to Billions in revenue), how many employees do you need to prevent an upstart from overtaking you through improved tech, product, or strategy? For example, if FB never invested in ML they would have had even larger margins (fewer GPUs and ML engineers), but now that investment may pay off by fending off tiktok through copycat products and also rebuilding ad attribution after ATT. To complicate matters, before it happens, you don't know in what area your competitor will arise (ML? Product? Paradigm shift?). Similar examples with Google vs. OpenAI, ~2010s Kubernetes wars between cloud providers, Snap vs. FB/Twitter, etc.
    • shadowtree 4y ago
      If you compete with startups with tens of employees - shouldn't you use tens of employees to counter their strategies too? Do you need endless hanger ons in HR, PR, all kinds of non-producing departments? Crappy CEOs, which is not the same as a crappy founder, have grown companies without any sense and purpose. Daniel is a great founder and rode great luck. But, he should have been replaced with a Eric Schmidt operator figure a while ago. I think the founder clings to company forever is coming to an end, in most cases going public should mean a new CEO.
  • MontyCarloHall 4y ago
    >legal/purchasing dept for music rights I would imagine this is where the majority of their staff are. Spotify’s catalog is huge, and record labels are constantly renegotiating extremely granular contracts with the streaming services (i.e. at the individual song level). For example, I’ve seen particular songs on albums disappear for a few weeks (the rest of the album can still be played), then mysteriously return (or not), all because of some cryptic licensing shift from the record label. There is no easy way to automate this; a human interaction must occur between the label and streaming service every time a weird licensing shift causes a particular song/album/artist to be removed. Given the size of Spotify’s catalog, there are probably thousands of such licensing changes each day.
• TurkishPoptart 4y ago
  Why does it take 12k people to stream a song on my phone? I'm being kind of sarcastic but kind of not.
• switch007 4y ago
  I got fed up with the poor UX and Scandinavian songs shoved in to my Discover Weekly, so I cancelled a month ago. I haven’t missed it at all. I just use YouTube occasionally to listen to music.
• noisy_boy 4y ago
  We just sort of came off a pandemic into what seems like another pandemic.
• bobobob420 4y ago
  Side note but every year Spotify's app gets worse and worse as they remove features and try to 'simplify' the UI. Has anyone been able to use the home screen where recommendations are offered successfully? They want people to listen to podcasts but can't even build a useable interface for browsing podcasts. All the Spotify playlists have the same songs over and over. Their proprietary shuffle algorithim is stupid because it doesn't actually shuffle. Why can't they offer a true random and also their shuffle algorithim? Music discovery is falling off as they are forced to promote record labels point of view.
• nayuki 4y ago
  This announcement is really beating around the bush and burying the lede. The sentence "And for this reason, today, we are reducing our employee base by about 6% across the company." comes after about 10 paragraphs, and is 70% down the length of the text. The vague, ephemistic title "An Update on January 2023 Organizational Changes" doesn't help either. If I saw this article on its own, I would probably miss its main point. But because I saw this from HN, the title from HN - "Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%" - told me what I needed to know.
• morgango 4y ago
  At one point I tried to switch to Spotify for my podcast consumption and quickly found it to be unusable as soon as I had to travel. They simply are not interested in the podcast consumption features, like downloading the latest X episodes and having them easily available offline. I hope they can figure out that podcast episodes are not spoken word songs that go into playlists.
• whatever1 4y ago
  So saving less than booting Joe Rohan ?
• amir734jj 4y ago
  I am a Spotify user for a long time. I don't understand this layoff. They spend millions on podcasts deals ... I just want a music app with good discovery option and offline listening mode. Am I asking too much?
  • baguettefurnace 4y ago
    sounds like you'd like Pandora
• saos 4y ago
  Reminder. You’re disposable. I matter how secure you think you may be.
• mikhael28 4y ago
  Spotify is overrated. Apple Music is the same, in the aggregate, and Apple's family plan allows you to share it with everyone. Spotify also sells all your previously 'private' public playlists to other platforms and advertisers.
• kderbyma 4y ago
  I canceled recently. they suck. they keep making the platform worse and worse and it's following the trend of every single paltform was good...got shitty....I unsubscribe...my life improves...I find alternatives and rediscover the way things were before streaming ruined it....forget about the stream until a new article mentions they are laying off staff... remember I was using them until recently....stop thinking and move on..put on an album and relax.
• confidantlake 4y ago
  The thing that annoys me about spotify is the order does not seem to work. I was listening to some beach boys songs, then went to play an album by marvin gaye. It played the first song in the album, then went and started playing beach boys songs again. This just started happening this week, never had the problem before. Another problem was podcasts were either missing episodes or playing out of order.