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 dedic

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.