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Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%

jmarchello
134 replies
2h20m

Anytime I see layoffs like this, All I hear is "We hired for the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal 'growth', But now reality has set in and we need our employees to serve a purpose beyond simply headcount".

In my opinion they did these employees a disservice by hiring them in the first place. We need our companies to act more responsibly regardless of the price of capital. Innovate sure, but don't fill up your tank when gas is cheap just to do doughnuts in the parking lot.

crazygringo
46 replies
1h27m

This is completely backwards.

They didn't hire "for the sake of hiring" -- they hired specifically to build up their podcasting and audiobook efforts, which were totally new products within the app. Which they thought were essential to staying competitive -- e.g. what if people start moving over to Amazon instead with its Music+Wondery+Audible, or other competitors?

Now it's turned out those bets haven't been as successful as they wanted, so they're keeping them but massively scaling back on future investment. Which means they don't need those employees anymore.

Honestly, what do you expect Spotify to do? Not try to stay competitive, and risk a competitor taking their place, and then go the way of Pandora? Do you think it's wrong to hire teams to build products when you hope the products will succeed but you can't know 100% for sure?

This is just how normal, healthy business goes. You make bets, sometimes they succeed wildly, and sometimes they don't. When they don't, it often results in layoffs because there's not enough profit to keep paying those employees with, and there isn't immediately any new product for them to work on.

Believe me, a company with profit margins as thin as Spotify's can't afford to "hire for the sake of hiring". That's just not how it works.

buro9
20 replies
1h15m

They placed a bet, and that bet didn't pay off.

But what I'd expect is for them to cut only a little (not 17%), because they would place another bet on something else to remain competitive.

To cut so heavily looks like they've no great idea on the next bet that they could make, that they don't believe those people they hired could contribute towards another thing in the near future (or they have no runway to explore doing so).

Companies should place bets to stay relevant and grow, this looks like there isn't a big bet now.

kojeovo
16 replies
1h0m

Interesting way to look at it, a bet. A bet involving people's livelivehoods.

explaininjs
7 replies
55m

A bet involving paying people a salary for as long as is feasible? Cool!

r3d0c
6 replies
50m

and destroying their future plans they might have set in motion that will be derailed because of management's incompetance, they don't have money that much money to float on specially in this economy where everything is overpriced, almost like they are humans with their own histories and possibly other people depending on them, did you really try and consider their perspective or was dehumanizing them your first instinct?

but i doubt management will be fired will it? they'll end up with nice fat stacks of bonuses for making terrible business decisions

keep defending the real incompetants though

explaininjs
4 replies
44m

Believe me, I have very very close experience with what it’s like to go through layoffs, and I feel for those who have just now realized that nothing in this world is guaranteed.

But griping that management should have kept paying salaries when the money wasn’t there won’t get anyone anywhere. Take your severance, hone your skills, apply for jobs. If you can, maybe take some time to go on a trip. Life will go on.

morelisp
3 replies
21m

when the money wasn’t there

What about when the money is there? Spotify is profitable.

explaininjs
2 replies
11m

Barely, and only after their previous layoffs this year.

morelisp
1 replies
5m

... so the money is there.

explaininjs
0 replies
2m

And it will be when they rehire later :)

robertlagrant
0 replies
27m

or was dehumanizing them your first instinct?

This is a really poor approach to discourse. I imagine you don't really think that every job must last forever. Jobs come and go, and working them means we can live and make choices. It's not fun being laid off (I have been), but it's just life.

scarface_74
6 replies
49m

People should know that know job is permanent and plan accordingly. Do you really expect to work at one company the rest of your career and get a gold watch and a pension ?

fisf
3 replies
28m

That is entirely correct. But it also implies that employees need to price that uncertainty into their salary demands.

scarface_74
0 replies
20m

Exactly

KptMarchewa
0 replies
15m

You're stating obvious things.

HDThoreaun
0 replies
19m

Do they not? American salaries sire much higher than european ones with more job security for example.

fragmede
0 replies
43m

It's worth noting that. Sweden, where Spotify is based, still does that whole pension thing, so culturally, relatively, actually yes.

checkyoursudo
0 replies
28m

But why shouldn't we expect to be able to work for one company and earn a gold watch (at some anniversary date, I guess?) and a pension?

It used to work that way. Why not now? It worked that way for my grandpa. It looked like it was going to work that way for my dad, until the corporate world did its huge pension rug-pulls. But it could still work that way.

I have a pension now (Sweden). My wife has one (Germany). You could, too.

robertlagrant
0 replies
54m

A bet involving people's livelivehoods.

Giving the employment market another livelihood option was the bet.

echelon
1 replies
57m

because they would place another bet on something else to remain competitive.

Now might not be the best bet making time. Circumstances and the market change.

Revolving loans might cost more to service, which also impacts R&D and product expenditures. It's very dynamic.

To cut so heavily looks like they've no great idea on the next bet that they could make, that they don't believe those people they hired could contribute towards another thing in the near future (or they have no runway to explore doing so).

Exactly this. And that's just reality. No company has perfect information.

Companies should place bets to stay relevant and grow, this looks like there isn't a big bet now.

AI clearly is looking interesting and shaping up in a big way for music, but the iron probably isn't hot enough to strike yet.

These are hard problems that leadership constantly grapples with.

buro9
0 replies
40m

Now might not be the best bet making time. Circumstances and the market change.

This is true, but I personally believe that the loss of knowledge and experience from within is a significant drag on momentum for when you do want to hire again... these people likely won't return even if the markets change, they've been burned, why would they return.

If it's possible to place the next bet, retain as much knowledge and experience as possible, and leverage that towards something new, then surely that is the best thing to do.

Could there have been other bets? Probably, if audio is the definition of the market and what you have at the moment is predominantly Western music, then stronger pushes into native apps for different markets? A classical specific app / flavour? A jazz specific app / flavour? Podcasts are good, but I think audiobooks are better... the audiobook market does not feel "done" at all, there's a lot more that could be done here too. Generational AI dynamic music could be a thing too, not streaming a file but streaming the basis of a constantly generated infinite thing, i.e. study aids, sleep aids, etc. Or how about audio app sync with video devices to enable the audio from your film to come out of your smart speakers or Hi-Fi even without a 5.1 amp?

A lot of these are smaller bets than "podcasts will be worth a gazillion dollars", but each is still significant, sticky, and leads to higher retention, and fights against the commoditization of music playback and the low margins there.

17% cuts does signal a lack of ambition despite "economic headwinds", it feels like a "we need to cut deep" rather than a "what are all the new bets we can make and then we are compelled to cut the difference".

heyjamesknight
0 replies
47m

This is what happens during periods of economic uncertainty. It's like counting cards with a freshly shuffled deck: nobody can tell what the state of the game is, so you place a minimum bet until you can get a feel for things again.

The movie is meh, but the boardroom scene in Margin Call has a great line:

"I'm here for one reason and one reason alone. I'm here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That's it. Nothing more. And standing here tonight, I'm afraid that I don't hear - a - thing. Just... silence."

Consumer confidence is down three straight quarters in a row. Nobody feels good about what the music is going to do next.

rez9x
6 replies
1h0m

I recently left Spotify for Apple Music, in large part because of this new development path. I don't want podcasts, audiobooks, etc mixed in with my music. I prefer separate apps.

I think what bothered me more was the focus on branching into these new paths without any innovation in the music department--I'm sure there was innovation that wasn't visible to me. I'm tired of the same black and green color scheme. I don't like that I don't have a 'Library' and everything just goes in liked or a playlist.

I think their expansion into other media was a signal to me to look for someone doing a better job at specializing.

explaininjs
3 replies
57m

Congrats! Now you get to experience the glory of the deque. Your days of being restricted to stack pushing are in the past.

rez9x
2 replies
43m

That (deque) is actually one of my favorite features, and something that had tempted me in the past. I have to relearn some behavior on queue creation though. I'm use to just clicking play, rather than adding to queue, so I end up with a bunch of songs in queue that I didn't intend (because I played a song from a longer playlist to start).

explaininjs
1 replies
40m

There’s definitely some annoyances… the paramount one for me is actually the opposite of what you describe: I click on an item to simply play it and it makes me deal with a pop up asking me how it should interact with my queue, even when I have no queue at all! Just play the damned song, stop asking me questions.

Ugh… things like this make me wish we had just one FOSS music player with a paid backend. I’d comment out all the modals and get on with life.

dingnuts
0 replies
0m

Nothing is stopping you from donating to Navidrome development

thefourthchime
0 replies
56m

Same here, plus the constant house ads. It seemed like every time i opened the App I had to close some banner ad for a new feature/record/whatever.

r00fus
0 replies
23m

Looking to do this - how did you migrate your playlists? Also my family was using my main Apple Music account - so I have to "clear out the new place" as I setup a family account for them.

jebarker
4 replies
1h18m

Honestly, what do you expect Spotify to do?

Innovate to grow, if growth is the objective. For example, they could better serve the audiophile market with higher quality offerings. Not as much growth there though.

scarface_74
3 replies
48m

And how does that help them make more money if they still have to always give the record label more money?

jebarker
2 replies
32m

How does innovation help them make more money? In the case of higher quality, they can charge more. There are premium services such as TIDAL doing that.

scarface_74
1 replies
21m

And if they charge more for the relative few people who want it, the record label still gets 70% of the revenue. They have to do something that is not dependent on music licensing.

jebarker
0 replies
11m

My point still stands. They chose the path of trying to get market share from incumbents in the podcast and audiobook market rather than trying to innovate in their core music business and that has cost them in multiple ways.

lukeschlather
2 replies
1h4m

I am honestly looking to move to a competitor because of their podcasting and audiobook efforts. Well, and I don't necessarily care about those things per se but Spotify used to be a focused music app, and they keep removing things from the app in favor of whatever new "growth thing" they want to do this year. I never know when I load up the app what is going to have changed and take me an extra 5 minutes to find what I want.

They have done so much damage to their app's usability by trying to "grow" that someone could probably sell me on some ultra-premium subscription that actually had a good music player that functioned more like the music players of 15 years ago.

bobthepanda
1 replies
59m

FWIW I switched to Apple Music and the player is pretty good, plus the music is lossless.

explaininjs
0 replies
52m

There’s a lot about the Music app for Mac that makes me wonder how a trillion dollar company can produce such a crappy website (yes it’s a webview, not native), and the iOS app is jittery and buggy in its own way, but in the end I do agree it’s the best option around, and I’ve been a happy-ish paying customer for almost a decade now. (part of that time I had Spotify too)

ctvo
2 replies
1h7m

I think trying to normalize a ~20% workforce reduction as business as usual is a little bit much here.

Management made a lot of mistakes to get to this situation. It wasn't we tried a few things and it didn't work out, it was we burrowed too much money, spent too much money, and risked too much.

What other tech company has cut this deeply recently? You name their competitors, like Amazon and Apple -- is it happening there? 20% is not 2-3%.

robertlagrant
1 replies
31m

You name their competitors, like Amazon and Apple -- is it happening there?

Their competitors are not direct comparisons, though, and percentages can be a little misleading. Spotify is ~7.5k employees, and does one thing. Amazon is ~1.5m employees, and does many, many things.

ctvo
0 replies
18m

Amazon's layoffs are a percentage of corporate workforce, not their ~1.5 million warehouse + corporate pool.

jLaForest
0 replies
12m

This is just how normal, healthy business goes

17% layoffs is healthy? No thanks

enlightenedfool
0 replies
38m

So, can at least the execs that made the wrong bets be fired? Those are multi million dollar mistakes. But nope… they just take “complete responsibility” and fire the dev teams.

dbbk
0 replies
45m

You're half right. The podcasting and audiobook areas already had layoffs before. This is now layoffs across all areas of the business.

dangus
0 replies
10m

I think that people get really upset about layoffs like they're an example of poor planning, but in reality it's all a calculated risk.

Laying off employees isn't a very negative thing from the perspective of the corporation. Very few costs are associated with laying off employees. A few months of salary, but that's it. It's an at-will arrangement.

I learned in a business class that, mathematically, most companies acutally take too few risks. It's not hart to understand why when you start doing some the math: if you invest $1 million into 10 projects 9/10 of those projects fail but the one successful project makes $10 million, then your investment was broke even. But our brains see a 90% failure rate and want to be more conservative with our investments. Let's say, alternatively, we invest in 5 projects to be more conservative with our money, but because we didn't take enough moonshots we never found a project that paid off, so now we lost $5 million instead of breaking even.

Also, yes, it takes more people to build something than to maintain it. Employees don't like to hear it, but hiring employees that you deliberately plan to lay off in a few years is a completely valid strategy.

If we want this to change then we need to have our governments have better layoff protections in place, like mandatory severance or notice periods. The WARN Act does this but only for large employers making large cuts.

baggachipz
0 replies
33m

Honestly, what do you expect Spotify to do?

Not spend a fortune on Joe Rogan and then lay off people.

Kaytaro
0 replies
48m

It’s also healthy to get backlash from the public and investors for layoffs. Personally I don’t think it’s ever right to layoff employees for leaderships mistakes. It should be used as a last resort only when the entire company is at risk of going under. Based on their post it doesn’t sound like that’s the case, they even bragged about a “positive earnings report”.

AdmiralAsshat
0 replies
40m

Honestly, what do you expect Spotify to do?

The people who made the decision could bear the brunt of the failed "bet". But I'm willing to wager that the CEO's year-end bonus isn't going to change radically in light of this.

fullshark
28 replies
2h9m

What's the consequence for doing your employees a disservice? Maybe a few of the best and most important employees get jaded and quit. Morale company wide takes a hit. These companies don't seem to care and I guess I'm not sure they should.

For me, it's not just morale that's gone to shit, but I feel like I've woken up to the nature of the employer/employee relationship with all these layoffs. I was blind but now I see, we ARE human resources, and it's very likely none of us are irreplaceable, none of us matter really all that much to our employers and the cost cutting via offshoring/remote employee replacement / no backfill is probably just getting started.

hn_throwaway_99
10 replies
1h42m

I was blind but now I see, we ARE human resources, and it's very likely none of us are irreplaceable, none of us matter really all that much to our employers...

Interestingly, there was a really good article in the NY times yesterday that made that exact point: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/03/business/economy/doctors-...

Basically, the article was talking about how being a doctor or pharmacist used to be a very respected profession, and most doctors/pharmacists didn't previously see the need to unionize. With all the consolidation that's gone on in medicine over the past couple decades, though (the article talks about how many of them used to be partners in small doctor groups, that is increasingly rare these days), they now realize they're wage slaves just like the rest of us, and their management has been treating them like interchangeable widgets to squeeze the most productivity out of.

If doctors are unionizing, maybe software developers should rethink their historical aversion to the idea.

CamperBob2
9 replies
1h36m

Quite a stretch from "This company hired too many people and ended up having to lay off some" and "Hmm, maybe we're not as irreplaceable as we like to think" to "Let's all make ourselves less attractive to our employers by threatening to gang up on them."

But I guess unionization is the universal solvent for every HR problem around here.

4iuvosvjf23
7 replies
1h28m

How is that a stretch? If we're not irreplaceable then ganging up on our employers is a way for us to reclaim some of the leverage in this transaction that we lose by being replaceable.

dingnuts
6 replies
1h3m

it's not even ganging up, it's just hiring a middleman to do your negotiation for you, and they take a cut.

I'm good

explaininjs
4 replies
48m

Don’t forget all the “oh yeah I’m not allowed to fix that, that’s a CSS bug and I’m a JS Developer. You’ll need to bring in a CSS development team to look at that one”.

eropple
3 replies
38m

You understand that that only happens in unions when the union assents to those divisions, right? You understand that you get to vote about whether your union operates that way?

explaininjs
2 replies
33m

You understand you’ve removed all personal agency from the worker? They must now do what the thousands of others have decided is best for their job security, not what that individual actually wants to do. My gf used to be a split artist/technical person at her job, she loved it. It got unionized, and now: “Sorry bub, union says you aren’t allowed to make art any more. Keep your head down and script your scripts, we’re getting a real artist for the other parts. Oh yeah and it will be way more work to integrate with them than if you were doing the full stack, but we still want it done in the same amount of time so work late or whatever. Thanks!”

eropple
1 replies
20m

If that's an accurate representation of what happened, that sounds like a shitty union that's insufficiently understanding of the reality that efficiencies improve the bottom line in ways that workers can benefit from, too. Maybe, then, one should engage in that dreaded politics and make it better--because on the flip side, "personal agency" for a worker is just as likely to be "RTO and work late and no raises this year".

Only outliers ever win by atomization--and as somebody with a track record of being an outlier and operating successfully in atomized environments, I'd certainly rather not have my entire technical career be a high-wire act because companies can get away with it!

explaininjs
0 replies
2m

I do not know what RTO is, but her union is certainly shitty. And your advice of "in addition to taking on the job of training these artists and integrating with their sub-par assets, you should take on the job of a politician too, then you'd see how great unions are!" doesn't really gel. Some people want to just have a conversation with their boss about what work they want, not take up three new jobs because "The Guild" gave them a shitty contract.

hn_throwaway_99
0 replies
50m

it's just hiring a middleman to do your negotiation for you, and they take a cut.

That's a bad take. I can understand reasons for not wanting to join a union, but that's a pretty ridiculous assessment of what goes on.

The thing is, all of us like to believe we're special snowflakes and uniquely valuable. What many are realizing is that some of the only real power most of have is if we act collectively. It's not just "a middle man doing the negotiation for you", it's union members acting together, and organizing that way, that gives unions any power at all.

Just look at the recent Hollywood strikes - the only reason they got anywhere is the strong power of their unions (e.g. union members aren't allowed to work for any struck employer, worldwide, while a strike is ongoing). And actors and writers really do have special snowflakes, the big stars that make millions per film, and they're all union members, too.

I_Am_Nous
0 replies
1h4m

If Human Resources are just replaceable resources, you don't care about them outside of what they can do for you. If a company is consistently failing to recognize their employees as people who deserve dignity, maybe a collective group is necessary to ensure they start to. This can be government based or be a private union, but companies don't usually make changes beneficial to employees without some kind of outside pressure.

querez
5 replies
1h51m

I feel like I've woken up to the nature of the employer/employee relationship with all these layoffs. I was blind but now I see, we ARE human resources

I think that's just a normal process of growing older. Also: yes, of course you are a resource to your employer. An annoying one (stell or laptops don't usually talk back and has demands). I also don't think there's anything wrong with companies behaving this way. By all intents, purposes and employment contracts, it was always meant to be a "work for payment" type deals, nothing more. Of course, ideally your interests and the companies' align beyond that narrow scope; e.g. you're both interested in you becoming an expert in X, or in solving problems in area Y. But it really comes down to you being a resource for the company to produce stuff. Thinking back I realized that my elders and mentors and everyone worth listening to always tries to tell me that (e.g. by telling me "you're not your job", "look out for your WLB, noone else will", "a job is just a means to an end", "HR protects the company, not you", "always keep in mind that you're disposable"...). And yet it seems to be a lesion that everyone needs to rediscover for themselves eventually.

gtirloni
4 replies
1h36m

> By all intents, purposes and employment contracts, it was always meant to be a "work for payment" type deals, nothing more

That's exactly the opposite of what 99% of the companies sell to candidates. You must have seen stuff like this is a great place work, join the family, etc. So maybe you mean the hidden intent was that but that's not the message being broadcasted.

geodel
1 replies
1h13m

Well this is same for 99% products advertised on media. No one really take it at their face value. So why is employment advertising/selling is expected to be factual.

fullshark
0 replies
46m

People want to be seduced, it's why you said 99%, some percent of advertising works on all of us, and a major decision like "this is my job and how I spend most of my waking hours on this earth" is ripe for the employee to accept the seduction.

wahnfrieden
0 replies
1h12m

In fact they will try to terminate hires or reject candidates who express primary interest in work being "for payment". Every business looks for an edge, including exploitability checks (and checks against disrupting that line of thought for their other hires)

0xEFF
0 replies
1h13m

No company reflects “we’re family” in contracts or compensation packages. That fact alone tells us the message is and always has been bullshit.

weebull
3 replies
2h3m

The flip side is that these people had a good job for a few years, and can hopefully springboard on. The alternative is that they weren't hired by Spotify, or potentially at all.

As long as they were hired in good faith, and not to just see which people worked out, I don't have a problem.

thinkingtoilet
1 replies
1h50m

As long as they were hired in good faith

I think that's the OP's point. They were not hired in good faith and I agree. This mass hiring/firing cycle is playing games with people's lives and, as always, the people at the top are unaffected by it, and in fact maybe rewarded for it. This isn't a game, this is people's lives. It's a little less horrible if it's a remote position but people upend their lives and move for jobs all the time.

zucked
0 replies
1h6m

I don't think there's any particular malice to the ups and downs - it's just the nature of work these days. Employers and employees have pretty much laid bare their view that the other is simply a cog in their machine. That being true, folks need to understand, plan for, and not be particularly surprised when these ups and downs happen. That means having a runway for lean times, and knowing your worth, how to communicate it, and being flexible when things go pear-shaped. People do move for jobs all the time, yes, but I hope that part of the planning for that involves asking the question - "what happens if this job evaporates?"

hx8
0 replies
1h49m

I agree. The employees got a lot out of the trade. Money, experience, connections. In addition, anyone participating in the tech economy should be aware of the boom/bust cycles that have plagued its history. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that a tech company had a large round of layoffs. The employees should have been aware of the risks when they signed on.

nyokodo
2 replies
1h52m

we ARE human resources, and it's very likely none of us are irreplaceable, none of us matter really all that much to our employers

Now, remember this the next time you’re tempted to lose sleep, sacrifice family time or leisure for your employer and then act accordingly.

fullshark
1 replies
1h43m

It's not just that, most of us are knowledge workers, think about how many hours off the clock you spent trying to solve some business problem. Why aren't you enjoying your kid's soccer game and instead thinking about that problem at work? To make your upcoming work day easier, or is it because you're spending many many more hours on the clock actually, working for your employer?

When employers wanted your body, it was a lot easier to have separation between work and home life, but now that employers want your mind, that separation is incredibly illdefined for most of us I think. I used to give that time freely but now I wonder what's the point.

munksbeer
0 replies
43m

This is very true. I spend a lot of time thinking about work problems. On the one hand it does help me in some ways because those problems are there whether I like it or not and I don't seem to have the control to stop thinking about them. So it does help that sometimes I'll settle on a vague solution in my head before I fall asleep at night, but of course it would be better not to have to do this at all.

I have at times had idle daydreams about doing a job that ends at the end of the work-day and you literally do not have to think about it again. I'd say those sort of jobs are not well paid these days.

commandlinefan
1 replies
1h43m

none of us are irreplaceable

But the smart ones know now to be as irreplaceable as possible, however they have to.

I_Am_Nous
0 replies
1h0m

Be careful though, my father in law has told stories about people who made themselves irreplaceable by being the only person who can fix a machine because they allegedly fixed it in a way that breaks often enough that they can be the hero. A stain like that on your resume means your burned trust for potentially short term gains and may find trust is not given as easily as a result.

sheepybloke
0 replies
30m

One of the big things I saw when a company I worked at did layoffs was that more people left voluntarily than were fired, especially a lot of the people I saw as the best and brightest. Heck, it's why I left. To me, that's the biggest side affect of the layoffs. There's going to be a brain drain, not because you fired people, but because the morale and mental of the company has shifted.

iamflimflam1
0 replies
1h49m

“The graveyards are full of indispensable men(/women)”

It doesn’t matter how important or irreplaceable you think you might be - life/businesses/people will carry on without you.

ActionHank
13 replies
2h12m

Just remember they signed Joe Rogan for over 200 million and he's not brought in nearly that amount for them.

Did they retrench the people who made that decision? Did they retrench the management who approved that contract?

Spotify employees should be pushing for some degree of corporate and fiscal responsibility given they are retrenching, but they still gave Joe the bag.

jaywalk
5 replies
1h23m

Unless you are pretty high up at Spotify, you have literally no idea how much Joe Rogan has brought in for them. His podcast has been number one on the platform since it launched.

teg4n_
4 replies
1h14m

Personally, I cancelled my Spotify premium family plan over it. I doubt I’m the only one.

qzx_pierri
1 replies
21m

I suspect you didn't cancel your subscription because of Joe Rogan being given a deal at Spotify.

I think you cancelled your subscription so you could TELL people you cancelled your subscription as a result of Joe Rogan being given a deal at Spotify.

niceice
0 replies
1m

What people say vs what they do:

https://i.redd.it/kpi0jnr690tb1.png

jaywalk
0 replies
57m

I guarantee you're not the only one. Do you think Spotify brought on someone like Rogan without considering protest cancellations?

gnicholas
0 replies
1h7m

OTOH, the only reason I ever downloaded the Spotify app was because there was an episode of that show that I wanted to listen to, and it wasn't available anywhere else.

weebull
1 replies
2h0m

Are you missing a "not"? Otherwise you're not making sense.

ActionHank
0 replies
1h58m

Thank you!

rsanek
0 replies
1h48m

i feel like this is a pretty hard thing to assess without access to internal metrics

phpisthebest
0 replies
1h29m

Under What metric do you apply that? What goals did they have for his program?

My understanding was the purpose of buying Joe Rogan was 2 fold, one of course is to bring in new users, but that was not the only goal (maybe not even the primary goal) the other goal was to get more of their current users to have more listen time on podcasts and less on Music, they pay far far far far less for podcasts (in many cases nothing) than they do for Music.

If they were able to shift the total listen time it could have more than paid for Rogan even with out new subscribers

The contract is up for renewal very soon so if they drop him we know he did not meet their objectives. Somehow I bet they renew

niceice
0 replies
5m

How much has he brought in?

dimitrios1
0 replies
1h3m

Just remember they signed Joe Rogan for over 200 million and he's not brought in nearly that amount for them.

The fact that they signed Joe for that amount, and continued to air everything throughout all the controversies, throughout all the COVID years, and through some artist departures over him, signals that he has more than recouped that investment for them.

https://www.newsweek.com/joe-rogan-more-popular-ever-statist...

bogomipz
0 replies
1h23m

They also signed a deal with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry that was worth 20 million. They agreed to part ways in June. I'm guessing the reason was that it failed to deliver financially. See:

https://archive.is/Hgh3V

svarcoe
4 replies
2h6m

And they were still hiring too! My first day was last Monday haha, last day today

local_crmdgeon
0 replies
1h15m

Hope they gave you a fat severance package

hn_throwaway_99
0 replies
1h50m

That's so messed up when companies do that. Curious what your separation package was?

bogomipz
0 replies
1h46m

Wait, you were hired and laid off in the same week? I'm really sorry that happened to you. The fact that that was allowed to happen suggests a very dysfunctional and incompetent management culture.

Solvency
0 replies
1h41m

What team. What role.

hammock
4 replies
1h16m

Anytime I see layoffs like this, All I hear is "We hired for the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal 'growth', But now reality has set in and we need our employees to serve a purpose beyond simply headcount".... In my opinion they did these employees a disservice by hiring them in the first place. We need our companies to act more responsibly regardless of the price of capital. Innovate sure, but don't fill up your tank when gas is cheap just to do doughnuts in the parking lot.

I struggle to understand comments like this one. Spotify were being responsible at the time. Their employees are not 30-year mortgages, they are volunteer employees given no promise of continued employment.

Through a few degrees of separation it all boils down to "we could do X when prime interest rates were 3%, and now they are 8% we can only afford Y"

notpachet
3 replies
1h15m

They were being responsible at the time.

Another strong contender for humanity's future epitaph.

hammock
2 replies
1h13m

Remember hindsight is 20/20. If capitalists were as risk-averse as some would like, we'd be stuck in the past forever

notpachet
0 replies
37m

I get annoyed with comments like yours that reach for absolutisms to try and make a point. No, we wouldn't be stuck in the past "forever". We may just move more slowly into the future than you would prefer.

Given our historic inability to predict the long-term externalities of present-day technologies, I'd say a more cautious approach is warranted compared to the current YOLO strategy.

The only way the human race becomes stuck in the past forever is if it goes extinct.

morelisp
0 replies
40m

we'd be stuck in the past forever

You say this like it's self-evident it's a bad thing, but it's not, even if I'm a middle-class white guy in 1975, let alone an Oneida in 1475.

maxehmookau
3 replies
2h15m

I wholeheartedly agree. It's about time governments started signalling to employers that this sort of behaviour will not go unpunished. After all, it's the state that will have to pick up the tab for the rampant over-hiring in the form of social security and healthcare.

freedomben
2 replies
2h4m

What should the punishment be? Fines for layoffs?

toss1
1 replies
1h50m

Sure. There are all kinds of things that could be done to increase their consideration of moves like this and simultaneously benefit the people affected.

E.g., rather than considering only percentages of unemployed/employed to set rates for Unemployment Insurance, they could also add a "capriciousness" factor for events like this. Or, they could also require funds be provided for continuing education for those laid off. Heck, they could also just make a basic adjustment for the inherent bias in the Unemployment Insurance rates against small biz, where a single layoff/firing has a huge negative effect on your rates, more than firing 100 people for a medium-sized company.

But of course, for the "libertarians", this is evil regulation.

freedomben
0 replies
1h36m

Your comment was pretty good, but didn't need the weird potshot at libertarians at the end.

What your comment touched on though is how the companies already are "punished" in a way for it because it affects their unemployment insurance rates. That was established as a way to balance the needs of the company (unintended bad consequences happen to unemployment rates when you tie the hands of firing) with the needs of the people who are affected. Arguing that the balance is off seems like a much different argument than GP though.

gizmo
3 replies
1h59m

Who is "they"? Spotify executives who assumed the money printer would never run out of ink? The managers who hired and hired to expand their own empire? The software engineers who engaged in "resume driven development" by stacking abstractions on top of abstractions so they could play with cool new tech at work?

There is a lot of opportunism out there.

vkou
2 replies
1h51m

Top blame is on middle-management (100+ reports), because they set the rules-in-practice for how the organization actually operates, and second blame goes to top management (C-level), because their job is to keep the middle-management in check.

The line employees are just responding to the incentives that these two groups create, they aren't the ones steering the ship into the ground.

Any significant layoff that doesn't have a disproportionate number of people from those two groups thrown overboard is ass-covering. They are the ones who screwed up.

potamic
1 replies
1h23m

In what I've seen, this generally comes from top management, the board even in some cases. They set the agenda and approve budgets for everything the company does. Head count is a direct translation of this. In normal scenarios, head count becomes the bottleneck and limits how many things can be taken up for a given year. But during the pandemic, dollars became plenty and execs reached deeper into their wish list and triggered a hiring frenzy. Middle management rarely has a say in these matters. They only need to come up with plans that can ultimately fulfill management's agenda.

vkou
0 replies
1h17m

In what I've seen, this generally comes from top management, the board even in some cases. They set the agenda and approve budgets for everything the company does.

They do, but they are often blind, due to fog of war, of what actually happens in their firm.

Middle management controls that - by deciding on what kind of line-work (which they have visibility over) gets rewarded or prioritized. If the line engineers are spinning their wheels, doing architecture-astonaut nonsense for the sake of promotion, that's not because the CTO is rewarding it - it's because their 100-person director (who should at least vaguely know what each of their reports is doing this year) is.

coredog64
2 replies
1h48m

In my opinion they did these employees a disservice by hiring them in the first place.

These people got a high(er)? paying job during the period, have a well known company on their resume, and are being let go during a layoff such that no blame is assigned to their exit. What’s not to like?

michaelt
1 replies
1h7m

If they knew that was what they were getting into, great.

On the other hand, if I hire a guy, he quits a secure job, he moves his family all the way across the country, and then 3 months later I fire him because I changed my mind about what I need? That guy is absolutely not going to thank me.

gnicholas
0 replies
59m

Yes, it depends on those factors. One other factor is what would have happened at his old job. I have a friend who went from one big tech company to another was then laid off recently. There's a good chance the result would have been the same either way, since the first company cut a lot as well.

One factor that keeps people at a company is the knowledge that, all things equal, last hired is first fired. It's not hard and fast, but you tend to have fewer allies at a company you just joined, making you more susceptible. When someone decides to leave one company and join a new one, they know that they're giving up this advantage.

Aaargh20318
2 replies
1h29m

All I hear is "We hired for the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal 'growth'

In a healthy company, I would expect every employee to contribute to the bottom line, either directly or indirectly. They hired these people because they needed them to do a job, a job that somehow helps making the company money.

As such, unless there are sudden significant changes to the market and product (which as far as I can tell is not the case here), firing employees should result in lower revenues. After all, employees generate more money than they cost, that's the entire point of employees.

This leaves me with a bunch of questions when I read things like this:

1) If the company can get by without these people, what were they doing in the first place? 2) If these people did not contribute to the bottom line (directly or indirectly) what was the point in hiring them? 3) If they did contribute, why let them go?

yCombLinks
1 replies
1h25m

I've been a spotify subscriber for over a decade. Every single update has made the windows version worse at least. They've rebuilt and redesigned it repeatedly, for whose benefit I don't know. Obviously that is just the app side part of the whole org.

butlike
0 replies
55m

The 2011 app with blatant iframes partitioning the sections of the app was peak Spotify Desktop, imo

scarface_74
1 replies
54m

I keep reading this.

I don’t know how much Spotify pays or if it pays above market. But I much rather have a high paying job - especially if it doesn’t require relocation and then get laid off than not have a high paying role at all.

A job is not a marriage, it’s more like a a semi serious dating relationship. I’ve had 9 jobs in 27 years and 7 since 2008.

A job is merely a method to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter.

Once either me or the company decide it isn’t on our best interest to continue the transactional relationship, we break up and I change my relationship status to “open for work” and put myself back out there.

Amazon was my 8th job. I knew from reputation and 2nd hand experience, that eventually Amazon was going to Amazon.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38474212

And I planned accordingly from day 1.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37969302

fragmede
0 replies
12m

Nine serious relationships in 27 years, but no marriage? I bet you live in one of those heathen countries where sex before marriage is legal, don't you? If you weren't allowed to have sex before marriage, would you still be unmarried after 27 years of relationships? Sweden, where Spotify is headquartered, is 8,600 kilometers from the San Francisco VC-backed tech scene, and is just as culturally removed from it as well.

rPlayer6554
1 replies
1h3m

You can't have your cake and eat it too. There are plenty of other lower risk companies that have way lower chances of layoffs, but they don't pay as well. Working at a company that tasks risks and has a high rate of return also has a higher chance of making the wrong bet and needing to cut you. If you want a perfectly stable job go work in the government: you'll be practically unfirable.

- someone who was layed off from a FAANG corp. I was not done a disservice, I knew what I was getting into.

ghaff
0 replies
19m

Or the public sector. Anyone who thought a money-losing company like Spotify was a safe ship to jump on board didn't think things through.

chasely
1 replies
2h10m

I read it more like "we hired when money was cheap and were hoping that we could create some new revenue streams but that didn't work out and now we don't have much hope of revenue growth in these areas so we have to reduce costs."

kamikaz1k
0 replies
1h33m

That is how it should be read, because this is how these companies operate. My company's CFO was talking about this as we pushed for profitability (since the market expectations changed) and rationale for investment was exactly like you said.

"It's our job to grow, profitably, so if we think we can generate more than what we spend, we can invest. But if its not working, we will cut it."

Unless you have a specific reason to believe it to be otherwise.

wesapien
0 replies
1h32m

Put a cost to unwanted behavior and make people think twice with siding with Moloch

sparrowInHand
0 replies
1h19m

? If you are hired by a architect and a company is downsizing, its actually a recommendation. Your software works- it needs less people for maintenance then for growth. And at a company thats stagnating and going into survival mode- your skills will not be needed except for the last ditch pivots (which will be a architectural mess). Once more from the the top - to be let go in a software role from such a company, is a recommendation.

smugglerFlynn
0 replies
55m

Why, though? Investors are paying for doughnuts and smoke, and many tech companies are really in the drift racing business, not in "commute rationally" business.

The reality is, current economy has much less demand for this kind of a road show, but all their hiring was totally rational.

pm90
0 replies
2h11m

Innovate sure, but don't fill up your tank when gas is cheap just to do doughnuts in the parking lot.

Thats a nice ideal, but its not something that the companies are made to consider seriously. To them, cheap capital signals an opportunity to juice up their growth numbers, and expensive capital signals an opportunity to cut problematic employees from the team (and keep others on their toes).

Until there are real consequences these companies will not change.

paulddraper
0 replies
1h6m

don't fill up your task when gas is cheap

Of course you should!

do doughnuts in the parking lot

Of course you shouldn't!

Did Spotify do that?

mrcwinn
0 replies
1h32m

There is still no crystal ball. You take the opportunities as they are presented, especially given that your competitors are doing the same. Where exactly was your commentary on Spotify's business when times were better, urging them to leave more people without jobs?

lr4444lr
0 replies
8m

Hot take: it's a life skill to look at a company beyond the salary they offer you and get at least a basic sense of whether they are over staffed, well managed, offering a valuable service, and not in a dying industry - or at least be sure your role there is doing something high value to the critical service provided. Too many employees IME are just too comfortable with ignorance about their employer outside of their team and the other teams they work with directly.

hk1337
0 replies
1h48m

I remember comments clamoring how great Spotify was going to be because of their European roots compared to Apple (Music) a U.S. company.

geodel
0 replies
1h20m

"We hired for the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal 'growth'...

But that's the whole point of modern day life. Any benefit we have gotten we never looked critically what was the cost. It is only at discomfort and disruption we gain this great self-awareness of the world.

They did disservice in same sense if we consider giving job in people is some service to employees.

falcolas
0 replies
2h1m

You're kinder than I am, ascribing an actual staffing problem to their layoffs. All I see and hear these days is, "We want to bump up our share prices, and it's easiest to just lay off some people."

emodendroket
0 replies
1h56m

It’s hard to know what’s “responsible” when you’re operating a business at a loss in the hopes of becoming profitable eventually and then it just keeps going for years and years without making money.

dsaavy
0 replies
1h48m

A business by definition is not a valuable and transferrable business if every single person (including the C-suite) cannot be replaced without the business collapsing.

No one is immune to this or an exception. Top to bottom.

culopatin
0 replies
1h2m

On the other hand, 17% of headcount had a job during that time. Which one is better?

boringg
0 replies
1h44m

If we put ourselves back into the shoes of 2019-2020 there were people who were talking about a post-capital world because money was so cheap.

I'm not defending all the companies that hired quickly - but if you all recall it did seem like the world had changed significantly with way more use of technology. I believe the underlying bet was once everyone uses these tools people will inevitably keep using them. Coupled that with cheap money (for the past decade) and incredibly fast growth and no-one thinking that the rates were going to go up at least not in the near future.

I find it hard to act so certain and so clearsighted that companies were acting in bad faith as you seem to point to.

maxglute
100 replies
7h31m

Should have fired 80% of their employees years ago when service was reasonably feature complete. Not that I don't sympathize with people getting laid off, but feels like past a certain point, more heads changes products faster than can be fixed, and sometimes moving fast degrades what shouldn't have been changed in the first place. NPR acquisition drama aside, pocketcast has like 25 employees that makes the service slightly better every year while fixing obvious bugs.

Sometimes I don't understand how jumping from winamp to spotify goes from a handful to 10000 employees. Winamp + audiogalaxy (ah memories) probably covers 90% of spotify use case with probably 10 engineers, then just get some suckers to curate playlists for free.

danpalmer
66 replies
7h13m

What do you think the employees do?

I imagine there's a big team dedicated to getting inventory on the service through negotiations with music producers around the world. You'd need to keep them to continue expanding, adding newly produced music, and re-negotiating expiring deals.

There will be a large editorial team producing playlists, curation, tuning the algorithm with expertise, etc. That all needs to be localised and to cover lots of niche music tastes. That's also not evergreen content or work, it needs constant updates to remain relevant.

Then there's international expansion and enabling the tech to work for more countries, more languages, more payment methods, more types of music publishing.

Honestly, where do you get "80%"?

madeofpalk
45 replies
6h47m

There's at least one team devoted to screwing up the homepage, pushing content that I don't want like podcasts. Will not miss them.

maxglute
43 replies
6h36m

200m on Rogan has caused more than few of my friends to drop spotify permanently because they couldn't get him off their home screen recommendation for months. If only one engineer added a dismiss button.

eddtries
24 replies
5h15m

That’s a crazy reason to drop using Spotify

maxglute
6 replies
4h39m

I stopped my sub after Rogan AND Peterson pinned on my homescreen, and it just wasn't worth any drama it could stir with how often spotify is passively open. I like me the occasional Rogan, but Peterson is not someone I want to associate with, especially where I am, who I'm generally with, even accidentally. Like it's just dumb shit design for no good reason.

It was enough of an issue that I remember multiple support threads topics at the time.

Switched to plexamp for a while. Half a year later, I'm free riding off someones spare family plan slot.

whiddershins
4 replies
3h24m

Are you saying in your social circle if someone sees Jordan Peterson on your Spotify Home Screen you are concerned this would create “drama?”

nonethewiser
1 replies
2h52m

Peterson's podcast is in the top 30. Some people live very siloed lives.

bugglebeetle
0 replies
1h54m

Or they simply see this as the indictment of American society that it is. People preoccupying themselves with such obvious, dim-witted charlatans can disgust anyone, regardless of their popularity.

coldpie
0 replies
2h57m

I would definitely give someone the side-eye if I saw Peterson or Rogan on their phone, yeah.

J_Shelby_J
0 replies
2h57m

If I had Spotify open and Peterson was pinned to my Home Screen in an office setting, I’d be embarrassed. It would be a strong signal of a lack of education that could harm my professional career.

nonethewiser
0 replies
2h54m

I stopped my sub after Rogan AND Peterson pinned on my homescreen, and it just wasn't worth any drama it could stir with how often spotify is passively open.

If the image of the most popular podcast causes drama then it's those people who are on the fringe.

FirmwareBurner
3 replies
3h24m

>That’s a crazy reason to drop using Spotify

That's like saying people dropping Windows 11 for pushing Candy Crush and TikTok in the start menu si crazy. Is it really crazy? I don't think so.

If I'm a paying customer I want to be treated with respect. If you keep making my UX worse to push your own agenda I WILL drop you for the HDD of "definitely legit" MP3s ready to go.

andsoitis
2 replies
2h55m

That's like saying people dropping Windows 11 for pushing Candy Crush and TikTok in the start menu si crazy.

That's not the right comparison.

You don't buy the OS for entertainment recommendations and listening/viewing/playing/reading.

bluefirebrand
0 replies
2h29m

I'm probably not the common usecase but I don't use Spotify for recommendations either.

I hate recommendation engines in software. One of the first things I always turn off when I install Spotify is the "When we finish your playlist we'll just keep playing similar music we think you'll like" option.

All I use Spotify for is to save myself the trouble of maintaining a media server and tracking down all the music I like to put on it

FirmwareBurner
0 replies
20m

>You don't buy the OS for entertainment recommendations and listening/viewing/playing/reading.

Huh? I definitely use my OS for entertainment but I don't want it to shove their own content in my face, same how I don't want that from Spotify. If I want to discover new content, I'll explicitly seek it out, otherwise GTF out of my way and play my songs.

sdflhasjd
2 replies
4h58m

I didn't switch because of Joe Rogan, but Spotify kept changing the UI and at some point it got so annoying to browse music over the crappy podcasts being shoved in my face that I switched to Tidal.

metabagel
1 replies
2h30m

I felt like Tidal didn’t have as large a catalog as Spotify? What do you think?

sdflhasjd
0 replies
2h22m

I think the catalogue is just as good, but searching can be more difficult.

constantly
1 replies
5h3m

People have different priorities. It didn’t cause me to drop music subscriptions, but did cause me to switch to Apple Music.

ghaff
0 replies
2h3m

Not that Apple Music is God's gift to UI, but I prefer to keep my podcasts and my music separate and I don't want recommendations to be pushed on me.

AdamN
1 replies
2h45m

Why not? I don't have time for many ads and will go to great lengths to get rid of them - especially ones I don't like. With Spotify this is even easier because there are a number of replacements available.

eddtries
0 replies
2h9m

I think I'm using a different app to the rest of these commenters, I don't have anything as bad as people are talking about. Or do people just use the free version of the app?

the_snooze
0 replies
3h26m

It's not that crazy. Not Rogan-specific, but the podcast-first UI prioritization made Spotify on CarPlay a pain in the ass to use. There was no option to say, "No thanks, just give me music only going forward." Spotify clearly didn't want to serve my needs (i.e., to access music quickly), so I took my business elsewhere.

sercand
0 replies
1h17m

I dropped Spotify when they started to push more podcasts on my home feed as well.

madeofpalk
0 replies
5h2m

It's crazy to stop using a product because it's UI got worse by pushing content you don't want at the expense of what you do want?

Ignoring the Joe Rogan of it all - it's frustrating to open spotify to listen to music and it the page is full of overly produced podcasts instead. I think that's a pretty normal reason to not like a product.

jiveturkey42
0 replies
3h31m

Same reason I stopped buying Apple products - they shoved U2 into my iTunes library

epicide
0 replies
3h17m

By itself, sure. It's a litmus test of sorts.

It's kinda like how I judge most for-profit businesses based on the checkout experience. Usually (there are certainly valid exceptions), the process of me giving them money is what I expect to be the best experience I will ever have with that company.

Am I going to refuse to shop at a store simply because nobody cared about a payment process? No, not unless it's particularly painful or damaging to me in some way.

However, it's certainly a red flag and a warning that the rest of my interactions with them aren't likely to be better.

Same with the case here. If the landing page for a service product is so heavily pushing particular content in place of actually being useful for them, that's a pretty big red flag.

tl;dr by itself, it's a silly reason to drop it, but it can definitely reveal where business priorities currently lie.

10729287
0 replies
4h53m

Some people just put their money where their mouth is

danpalmer
14 replies
5h45m

I want to dismiss Rogan as much as anyone, but I think this underestimates the complexity involved. It's not just a button, it's what the button does, it's respecting opt-outs like that in a scalable way for many millions of customers, it's having a way to un-do those for users and for support agents when customers inevitably accidentally hide a podcast they want to see, it's GDPR data export and deletion of those flags to hide things, it's UX testing around whether users even understand what the button does.

I agree that a good product would do all these things and have a way to not show recommendations you don't want, but I get why these things might not exist.

When I worked in a <100 person startup we'd "just build it" and I'd probably spend a few hours on this, but we didn't have all these concerns. We didn't do user testing, we didn't care about scalability at this level. Now I work on Google Play, and if you want to add a button like this (that will need a database query) to a frontend it's a ton more work because the scale is so different.

michaelt
5 replies
2h51m

> I want to dismiss Rogan as much as anyone, but I think this underestimates the complexity involved. It's not just a button, it's what the button does,

This is the kind of statement that leads to people saying "Should have fired 80% of their employees years ago when service was reasonably feature complete." by making it sound like a big development team creates an unwieldy product then struggles to implement even the simplest of features.

The button is absolutely not missing because of any technical difficulty implementing it. Spotify is already storing per-user preferences - and doing all sorts of algorithmic stuff to make smart recommendations and suchlike, all with the ability to scale.

The button is missing for a business reason: They want their purchase of Rogan to be a success because they've spent a lot of money on it.

refulgentis
3 replies
2h43m

No, they're right: your understanding of each other diverges when you write "it's not because of any technical difficulty" --- correct, we all agree there. However, it is still difficult.

Big companies have big processes and that, at least at Google, would have prevented this from happening for at least 12-18 months. Then those things aren't pursued because of A) the literal cost of getting that arranged over 18 months B) the individual's decision not to invest in beating their head against a wall for 18 months for something that'd be done in a week if leadership cared. Leadership does not care, so QED, it will not be a positive for your career.

Things either get done because A) leadership cares and has skin in the game and everyone is afraid of getting in the way of whoever delivers B) leadership cares and will keep asking about it over and over again for a year or two or C) no one cares so no one will get in your way.

That's also the crux of why things at Google go sideways. A) is only true over a year long cycle (I.e. you need to get to launch) B) people are afraid to do because it's hectoring and C) if no one cares its probably not much of a game changer anyway, there's no incentive to do it, and especially in FAANG's Efficiency/Focus(tm) era[^1^], you can actually get pretty easily brow-beaten for it by middle management. Then what are you going to do? Appeal to a VP that your manager and managers manager are big ol meanies?

[^1^] I originally wrote error, which, lol

michaelt
2 replies
2h39m

> Big companies have big processes and that, at least at Google, would have prevented this from happening for at least 12-18 months.

Well gee, if all these software developers are making them slower at software development, it sure sounds like they should have fired 80% of their employees years ago when service was reasonably feature complete.

refulgentis
1 replies
2h35m

It's not the software developers. Companies and processes aren't run by software developers. I wish you were more curious about the gap between your understanding and others, it'd be a much more enlightening discussion with your interlocution, as it stands, we keep circling back to "all companies with long launch lead times should fire 80% of their software engineers"

michaelt
0 replies
2h10m

danpalmer believes ads for Rogan can't be dismissed because of 'the complexity involved' in specific technical areas such as being scalable; providing a GDPR export; offering an undo option; and providing a comprehensible user experience.

I would say questions like scalability and data exporting fall squarely upon the software development arm of the business; and if they had chosen an architecture which made it hard for them to deliver value, that would reflect poorly on them.

I am also arguing they probably didn't choose a bad architecture, because I don't think a technical issue is making it difficult to dismiss Rogan ads.

It's far more likely this is the same as Youtube making it difficult to dismiss Shorts, and Amazon trying to trick you into a Prime subscription every time you check out: They've decided their strategy is to make a number go up, and your personal experience is less important to them than that strategy.

rchaud
0 replies
2h20m

The button is missing for a business reason: They want their purchase of Rogan to be a success because they've spent a lot of money on it.

Precisely. If everybody was opted out by default, podcast growth would be anemic, and the product managers would find themselves on the list of people losing their jobs.

pradn
2 replies
3h15m

For something as simple as a dismiss button for a particular promotion, it's reasonable to store the bit on device. This will work for mobile and desktop apps, which I assume are the vast majority of Spotify usage.

Or they could invest in a generic "misc settings" column in their DB - to store random stuff like this in a blob. You could even query/index on them w/ something like Postgres's JSON support.

andsoitis
1 replies
2h57m

For something as simple as a dismiss button for a particular promotion, it's reasonable to store the bit on device. This will work for mobile and desktop apps, which I assume are the vast majority of Spotify usage.

No it isn't. When you "dismiss", the service needs to have a point of view (or UX to clarify) whether you want to dismiss it permanently or temporarily (I'm not in the mood for it right now).

You also need to deal with the cases where someone accidentally hits the button.

You also need to think about people who use multiple devices.

Should the algo's now update to say you don't like podcasts? You don't like talk shows? You don't like podcasts with themes that Rogan covers - what themes would that be?

etc.

whoopsie
0 replies
2h18m

This is not outside the realm of one sprint.

ta1243
1 replies
3h18m

update users set "show_podcasts=0" where userid = 12345

danpalmer
0 replies
3h14m

If you think it through there is so much more to do here. This is the 3 person startup solution, but really doesn't get you much further than that.

maxglute
0 replies
2h57m

I get you, but at the same time I'm more than little suspicious that they paid 200m for Rogan and just happens to plaster his face on my podcast tab like a permanent ad for months on end. IIRC it was right after also just acquired Bill Simmons also permanent thumbnail, basically fully visible unlike the third listing in the carousel that required scrolling. I find it hard to believe they couldn't rotate recommendations, or move it below the fold. This complaint was all over their forums, reddit, social media at the time. Their default answer on forum was, not yet, but features constantly coming. Avoided all the question of why can't they just remove the banner until feature implemented. I buy scaling features for 500m users is hard. I also buy using technical complexity is a cover for other motivations.

madeofpalk
0 replies
5h1m

Yet somehow they managed to do the impossible and add a "hide from Discover Weekly" button.

bcrosby95
0 replies
2h17m

Now take that thought and apply it to someone proposing to put a permanent Rogan-ad on the home screen. One of the first things that is going to come up is "but how can users remove it?" At the level of thought you're talking about here, someone somewhere already made the conscious decision to not make it removable.

rchaud
1 replies
2h23m

When you overpay massively for IP, you have no choice but to shove it down people's throats in the hope that even 1% decide to subscribe.

CoastalCoder
0 replies
1h52m

That sounds like a sunk-cost fallacy to me.

Note: For all I know, they really could be making that error. Or perhaps someone inside Spotify feels the need to make the Rogan investment at least break even, consequences be damned.

butlike
0 replies
47m

Yeah but the dismiss button has to be directly tethered to the machine learning analytics that is also tied to the retention team, so if too many people trigger it, the retention team is alerted to a potential user-retention risk. You need to write the API to hook into those two services, then make sure you have benchmarks before your pull-request will get approved.

You could do this, but I think the profile pictures would look better with rounded edges.

s3p
0 replies
3h29m

They’re not leaving. 17% of the staff doesn’t include the entirety of the curation team.

apwell23
9 replies
3h9m

Yea I worked at groupon when it was taking off and we had around 200 sales ppl calling up and negotiating deals with local business.

Everyone back then used to ask me the same question: Why does groupon have 500 ppl, isnt' it just a wordpress site.

makestuff
6 replies
2h40m

It is a shame for Chicago that groupon didn't continue to find success. I really think that if they had continued to grow the Chicago tech scene would be significantly larger than it is today.

boiler_up800
3 replies
2h33m

Absolutely agree. I’m not sure I can name another name brand Chicago tech company, which is devastating for their startup and venture ecosystem.

tempusalaria
2 replies
2h24m

Citadel.

Chicago has been a big centre for developers for finance companies for a long time. Hedge Funds, Market Makers, Asset Managers etc.

local_crmdgeon
1 replies
1h8m

Citadel is moving to Miami because Chicago government sucks - the move was due to "riots, an employee stabbed, and the attempted hijacking of his Ken Griffin's car"

https://www.businessinsider.com/ken-griffin-citadel-moving-h...

butlike
0 replies
44m

Yeah, Miami is going to be way better for crime...

butlike
0 replies
45m

Lefkofsky and the underwriters butchered the IPO for personal gain. I don't think it was a viable business model but they could have at least tried to steer the ship.

abtinf
0 replies
2h29m

Especially if they had succeeded in building the dome.

dmd
1 replies
3h1m

People who make CRUD sites think everything is just a CRUD site.

Gooblebrai
0 replies
2h54m

Engineering-bias at its best. Thinking about the product complexity but not about the business

mrkeen
5 replies
2h13m

What do you think the employees do?

Product stand-up, agile stand-up, team fika, cross-team fika, town hall, team activity, tribe activity, one-on-one, backlog grooming, team retro, incident post-mortem, ping pong, live music.

If you do scrape together a few minutes to get part of the codebase into your head (despite the open-floor-plan chatter), you've got no way to trigger that bug you think you saw.

But persevere anyway and diagnose it. Oh it looks like it's happening in someone else's microservice. File a JIRA? Bring it up at the next meeting? Try a different fix anyway. Happy with the fix? Wait in pull-request limbo until it's sorted. Release it straight into prod? You could bring down prod... Maybe you didn't really see that bug after all. Coffee time!

smus
2 replies
2h2m

I think you're missing the point that coding isn't the only type of job

mrkeen
1 replies
1h40m

Do you think that the non-coders have more time to do their actual work than the coders?

danpalmer
0 replies
41m

I think your representation of a software engineer's work is made in bad faith. There may be some like this, but from anywhere I've worked and anyone I've spoken to in the industry, it's a small minority. I haven't worked at Spotify but I have worked with an ex-Spotify engineer who was very productive and one of the best engineers I've worked with.

The representation is in bad faith because it overstates the balance of non-coding tasks, but also because it assumes these are "not work" or worth less than coding.

dbbk
1 replies
43m

A tiny part of Spotify's headcount is product & engineering.

mrkeen
0 replies
37m

See my sibling comment. Non-coders are just as capable as coders at doing non-work.

This site says 6000 engineers. That is enormous in both absolute terms and "as a tiny part" of Spotify.

https://thenewstack.io/how-spotlify-adopted-platform-enginee...

maxglute
1 replies
6h55m

Honestly, where do you get "80%"?

Lazy hyperbole and picked pareto 80%. Not remotely well calculated remark. Should have constrained comment to engineer/design team.

danpalmer
0 replies
6h34m

Well thanks for owning up to it!

I agree that it feels like the product from an engineering perspective was "finished" a while ago, however when I think about it for a while I can come up with many things that will need ongoing engineering work. For example, bug fixes (no one ever finishes this), support for new devices/phones/smart speakers/TVs/cars, support for payments and authentication in new regions, scaling work to scale to users in more regions, reliability and operational work.

And that's just the stuff that isn't about growing more. I think it's reasonable to expect that businesses want to grow, and this isn't always anti-consumer either, as it can result in services that appeal to more users and cost less. This means engineering work on the marketing funnel, onboarding, new markets like podcasts, and lots more.

aerhardt
0 replies
2h15m

I find their algorithms for recommendation (song and artist “radios”) far inferior to 2000’s Pandora, so at least in that area I agree with GP that throwing 1000 times the resources at the problem doesn’t seem to be doing anything…

NickC25
0 replies
1h28m

Spotify had a large headcount.

Let's look at some of your examples and see where things can logically be cut.

I imagine there's a big team dedicated to getting inventory on the service through negotiations with music producers around the world.

This can be streamlined considerably through standardized contracts. I'd wager 90% of the inventory that said team gets is from niche artists, independent artists or small labels. Very few artists actually have the clout or resources to negotiate their own deals with Spotify. That's sort of the point of having executives - to handle the Taylor Swifts of the world. Your local band, rapper, singer-songwriter or producer doesn't matter to Spotify.

Have a clear and straightforward tier system for compensation. You get a billion streams a year? You get $X. You get 10,000 streams a year? You get $Y.

There will be a large editorial team producing playlists, curation, tuning the algorithm with expertise, etc. That all needs to be localised and to cover lots of niche music tastes. That's also not evergreen content or work, it needs constant updates to remain relevant.

You don't need a large team to curate playlists when you can have users curate playlists. In fact, they already do. You don't need a huge localization team either. Users already take care of the legwork for you. Same goes for algorithm tuning.

Then there's international expansion and enabling the tech to work for more countries, more languages, more payment methods, more types of music publishing.

Spotify is kinda already there in terms of international expansion. Anywhere they aren't already, they probably won't get there for political reasons (such as China).

More languages? Sure, but that doesn't require a massive team. Fortunately, there are a few dominant languages around the world, and Spotify has those covered.

More payment methods? Let the creators of those methods handle that - that's their job. Credit Card companies or banks or whatever don't create their own payment platform tech and just say "now it's yours to try to implement", they have entire teams dedicated to that.

More types of music publishing? Like what? There's only so many methods of publishing music, and I'd wager there's going to be very little (if any) innovation there for a while. Spotify doesn't really distribute any other forms of published music besides digital streams. They aren't selling records or CDs, are they?

EDIT: you could also say Spotify has vastly overspent on the likes of Joe Rogan, no matter how popular he is. $200 million dollars to a company that isn't very profitable, no matter how large, is just bad business. He's worth nowhere close to $200 million.

surgical_fire
17 replies
6h14m

I love this kind of comment. It's the sort of bad take that keeps bringing me back to HN.

Let's entertain your bullshit for a moment - if you truly believe that, what is stopping you from disrupting Spotify with your company with 10 engineers?

I mean, their biggest cost is likely their workforce. If you can do the same with a fraction of the cost, you are leaving a lot of money on the table.

maxglute
16 replies
5h57m

Relax, I was being hyperbolic. Does spotify need 20x more employees than Valve/STEAM? How's twitter working with 80% less employees? Sure it's worth less, but it works mostly fine. Yes spotify needs more than 10 employees, but did it need 10000? After these rounds of cuts, will it still need 7500 next year? I surmise it can settle much lower than what people expect, and maybe their service/product would have been better without having that many brains adding creep/degrading the product (subject to opinion) in the first place.

addicted
8 replies
5h6m

Does spotify need 20x more employees than Valve/STEAM?

The difference is the person you’re responding to doesn’t claim to know the answer to something it’s almost impossible for either of you to know the answer (unless you have inside knowledge or have done a deep dive on Spotify).

How's twitter working with 80% less employees?

Extremely poorly. It’s hemorrhaging money and it’s hemorrhaging users. Competitors are arising where almost none existed for about a decade and a half.

The point of having employees in a major platform based company isn’t just to “work fine”, but to out compete massive trillion dollar companies while at the same time fending off tiny 2-3 person startups which may come with a completely new idea or approach out of nowhere. Twitter’s reduced workforce only allows it to exist but has made it extremely hard to actually defend from those forces.

And to the extent it is succeeding to retain any users it’s almost entirely because of the advantages built by the company when it had a much larger workforce.

The only caveat I will add is that a lot of tech companies over hired during the pandemic due to FOMO more than anything else, and we know this because most of their CEOs have said as much.

whywhywhywhy
4 replies
3h6m

Extremely poorly. It’s hemorrhaging money

Always has no?

and it’s hemorrhaging users.

No it's not, it has hit multiple usage records this year.

Competitors are arising where almost none existed for about a decade and a half.

Threads is a ghost town, Bluesky has pushed like 1 update this year, mastodon while it's found it's niche it will always be a niche because normal people don't understand or care what federation is.

Don't believe everything you read from people aggrieved by a service.

zer0tonin
0 replies
2h12m

No it's not, it has hit multiple usage records this year.

My twitter feed is literally a ghost town

twelve40
0 replies
2h12m

...but if you use the word "extremely" enough times maybe everyone will finally see that they just can't exist without 100000 programmers </s>

metabagel
0 replies
2h20m

No it's not, it has hit multiple usage records this year.

Really? I’m not sure I believe it.

Elon promised to get rid of the bots, but when I briefly stick my toe in that open sewer, I get the impression that there is a lot of astroturfing.

dewey
0 replies
2h3m

No it's not, it has hit multiple usage records this year.

You can't claim that if there's no official source for it and the only source is Elon (With a track record of lying) posting about it on his service.

FirmwareBurner
2 replies
3h20m

>Extremely poorly. It’s hemorrhaging money

Was Twitter in any way profitable before Musk took over, or was it coasting on zero interest investor money on the premise that "one day" it will be profitable?

>Competitors are arising where almost none existed for about a decade and a half.

Competitors rise all the time, the question is which have the sticking power to beat Twitter.

mmiyer
0 replies
3h6m

Twitter had multiple profitable quarters before Musk tool over

coldpie
0 replies
3h6m

You can google this, but the short answer is yes, Twitter was profitable before the takeover. https://www.statista.com/statistics/299119/twitter-net-incom...

surgical_fire
1 replies
2h3m

Does spotify need 20x more employees than Valve/STEAM?

I don't know. Maybe?

Nowhere it says Spotify have 10k employees in IT/Engineering. Perhaps a large portion is in Legal or Compliance. Dealing with regulations around music distribution on a global scale looks pretty complicated to me.

Also, Spotify does streaming, which is a fundamentally different - and more complex -business than e-commerce of digital goods (which is Valve's business model).

Ultimately, my point still stands. Spotify has competitors. If they are so bloated, nothing should stop a leaner competitor to eat their lunch.

How's twitter working with 80% less employees?

I didn't use Twitter before Musk took over, and I don't use now. So it's difficult for me to compare their two incarnations.

I'll just mention that on a recent interview Musk said (in very colorful language) that the current advertiser boycott may kill the company. So my guess is that Twitter is not doing very well with only 20% of the workforce.

ghaff
0 replies
1h57m

In Twitter/X's case, I'm not sure how much is related to large cuts in headcount and how much is that Musk's behavior just cause a lot of people and companies to re-evaluate their relationship with Twitter. I know for me so many people either went elsewhere or, probably more commonly, decided they didn't need this sort of service that I cut way back on my use.

rospaya
1 replies
3h33m

Relax, I was being hyperbolic

I see this type of hyperbole twice a week on HN and it's getting really boring.

code_runner
0 replies
3h12m

sounds like you must only log in to HN about twice a week in that case..... a lot of lazy/bad takes on here that equate to "large company bad". Definitely gets a reddit vibe especially if its an announcement like this.

whywhywhywhy
0 replies
3h8m

Relax, I was being hyperbolic. Does spotify need 20x more employees than Valve/STEAM?

Record labels are far more awkward to deal with legally than video game publishers, so wouldn't be shocked if they needed X more lawyers at least.

pradn
0 replies
3h13m

New bots follow me on Twitter every day, spamming my notifications. They're very obviously a bot bc their name and lack of posts. I rarely had that problem before the downsizing. I think my follow count went up 20% in the past year, nearly all bots.

Otherwise, the service is generally reliable.

apwell23
0 replies
3h7m

How's twitter working with 80% less employees?

Hasnt this been done to death on hackernews ( and elsewhere) . why do we keep beating this dead horse

acjohnson55
4 replies
2h46m

At every company I've worked at, there are things we want to do that nearly everybody think are a good idea. But we can't do them all, because we have limited capital. So we have to be very strategic.

Spotify has developed a huge surface area, because they are attempting to be the one-stop shop for all things audio. The thesis is that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and that's what they're selling to investors. That means there are countless bets they could be making at any one time, to compete with everybody else out there.

For a company of Spotify's stature, when capital is cheap, they can raise the money to do all the things, all at once. They don't have to make prioritization choices. Usually this means many dozens of teams, which each seem pretty lean if you zoom in. Like, I'm guessing there's a team of 3ish developing the in-app lyrics experience, or something like that. The scale is in how many of these bets are going at once.

The capital markets have changed, and now Spotify (like many others) has to constrain its bets. The thesis hasn't changed, but their capacity to try to prove it out isn't as limitless as before.

varjag
1 replies
2h19m

10000 employees with let's say 40% overhead translates into 2000 3-ish lean teams. Certainly some would be far larger than 3 person but even then. Is Spotify surface that huge really?

SpicyLemonZest
0 replies
37m

Maybe? At Spotify’s scale, those teams would include things like “GCP-friendly audio encoding optimization” or “playlist sharing scalability”. I don’t know enough to estimate what a reasonable size should be (if such an estimation is even possible), but running software for hundreds of millions of users is hard.

esskay
0 replies
1h12m

they are attempting to be the one-stop shop for all things audio

The only problem with that approach is they now have a huge number of half baked or broken features. It's infuriating as hell when you spot a bug or something not working as expected only to find a post on their community dating back close to a decade, with thousands of people confirming the issue and someone from their team repeatedly replying with a vague message about passing it on to the team.

Spotify's development has somehow been run at a snails pace even with their huge headcount.

StevePerkins
0 replies
39m

I don't think the question is whether Spotify should or shouldn't persue podcasts and audiobooks in addition to music streaming.

The question is whether any organization really needs 5-20k tech workers for an audio app. Even one that plays music, podcasts, and books. I would be slack jawed with shock if the Apple team that works on their podcasts app, and the Amazon team that works on their Audible app, COMBINED were a meaningful fraction of that scale.

And it's certainly fair game to question why they don't have more resources allocated to longstanding issues with the core product. Especially given that the core product hasn't noticeably changed much in years.

piva00
3 replies
7h9m

Sometimes I don't understand how jumping from winamp to spotify goes from a handful to 10000 employees. Winamp + audiogalaxy (ah memories) probably covers 90% of spotify use case with probably 10 engineers, then just get some suckers to curate playlists for free.

The complexity is not the player, it's the whole business... Winamp didn't have recommendations, tack on another 100-200 people working on data to surface those. There are close to a 100 markets being offered content with licencing deals, each with different regulations.

There are internal platforms, infrastructure, development, each platform requires team(s) to maintain, and develop them.

What's the size of the largest tech company (with a single product) that you've worked at? Just so I know how to translate how larger organisations work to a worldview that you have experience with.

maxglute
1 replies
6h39m

No need, I was being flippant. I don't work in tech but dealt with large orgs. Broad point is, by all means, have your headcount for signing labels, localization, maintaining physical infra. But past a certain amount of brains and you get feature/vision creep that starts degrading core product. Where/when that point is of course highly subjective.

But how many employees does a music streaming service need? I don't know, but last I read, Valve had less than 500 employees on everything including Steam before they ramp up headcount for hardware. Did spotify need 20x more? Maybe nature of music streaming needs 9000 more employees to deal with labels. But my uninformed opinion is, probably not.

Closi
0 replies
2h23m

Well I just googled and Valve has 1,139 employees, and Spotify will now have 7,800 - It's nowhere near 20x.

Still a big gap, although I suspect they are very different offerings and companies. Differences include:

* Spotify needs to sell ads (to support it's free tier). This requires engineering and people to sell the ads.

* Spotify is in a more competitive market than Steam (who have a nearly de-facto monopoly) so more advertising/marketing effort is required.

* Interfacing with the entire global music industry takes time and resource.

There may also be differences to the extent these companies outsource and use contractors which could make it more difficult to see actual headcount.

butlike
0 replies
41m

Those were the days. Winamp. The tiny media player that booted instantly, had such a low fingerprint you could safely have it playing while gaming. The media player you could re-skin. You could later hook into lastfm to "scrobble" your listens if you wanted them to persist after a WinXP reinstall.

yibg
2 replies
1h43m

No idea where the 80% or 90% coverage comes from, but let’s assume the numbers are right and you get 90% with just 20% of the current staff. Spotify has revenue of 13 billion a year. 10% of that is a bit more than a billion. Spotify has 9000 - 10000 employees, let’s round up and say 10,000 employees. If they can get an extra 1 billion at a cost of 8,000 employees it still might be worth it if they can spend 100k per employee per year. Doable for a mix of roles and geographies.

At some scales of business, spending a lot more to get incremental gains can be worth it.

Solvency
1 replies
1h38m

What in the absolute fuck are 10000 people doing at Spotify? Really try to crunch those numbers mentally here. It's insane.

kredd
0 replies
1h20m

Supporting half a billion constant users around the world, and staff dealing with local artists and bands from almost every single country. Even outside of engineering they need a ton of support staff — starting from marketing to lawyers. Every country is fairly different as well when it comes to “music style”, so there’s a significant tailoring I would say.

They’re doing whatever they’re doing pretty well as well. It’s basically the only subscription service at this point I wouldn’t consider to get rid of.

tarsinge
0 replies
6h11m

If a company needs to fire people to prevent a product from degrading then it’s too late the company culture is rotten to its core.

miyuru
0 replies
56m

Spotify also has studios in multiple locations.

https://spotifystudios.com/

Ajay-p
0 replies
3h4m

When startups receive huge waves of investor cash it can seem like the runway is forever. Look at Twitter which had far more employees than it needed. When the cash seems infinite there may be a tendency to forget the principle of staying lean.

mvdtnz
80 replies
9h24m

I wonder how those losing their jobs feel about Spotify's reported $200 million investment in Joe Rogan now.

anon23432343
39 replies
9h19m

It was and still is a stupid decision to buy Joe Rogan. I don't get why people listen to him... He is not funny nor smart. It sometimes feels you get better value when watching morning tv shows...

mvdtnz
10 replies
9h15m

I feel neither positively nor negatively about Rogan himself (I've never listened to him) but it was plainly a very stupid investment on Spotify's part. Anyone could have predicted (and most of us did) that only a fraction of his audience would follow him behind the paywall and removing him from mainstream free outlets would instantly diminish his cultural relevance.

bluescrn
8 replies
9h11m

‘Diminishing his cultural relevance’ may have been the goal.

Reducing his audience, censoring his most controversial past episodes and preventing certain conversations from happening in front of his large audience in future?

Shish2k
7 replies
8h59m

Spotify paid $200 million… to tie a podcaster to their sinking-ship podcast platform (and this plan only works if they know and intend for their platform to sink)… just to get him from a big spotlight to a small spotlight?

rickdeckard
4 replies
7h43m

It wasn't a "sinking-ship podcast platform", it was Spotify's strategy to own content and thus reduce cost for per-play licensing.

They went for the Netflix strategy for growth. We now know the podcast-idea didn't translate into as many paid subscribers as they expected, but with ~25% of all Spotify subscribers listening to podcasts [1] it's not a "sinking-ship podcast platform"

[1] https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/spotify-podcast-subscr...

teg4n_
0 replies
29m

it would have made more sense to create their own record label than to try to turn a free and open platform like podcasts into a closed platform like they tried with podcasts

dundarious
0 replies
1h3m

In the last few months, several podcasts that were only available on Spotify, have become available via traditional podcast means. For example, Heavyweight. Others did so earlier, though for specific reasons (Science Vs had a spat with Rogan over "dis/misinformation", where I largely agree with them factually, but disagree with them on the use of those terms, etc.).

I think it's fair to say there's a reasonable indication that Spotify exclusivity has been a bad bet for a decent amount of their podcast portfolio. Maybe it works still for Rogan-sized podcasts, but even that's unknown.

I wouldn't be dismissive of a label of "sinking ship", even though it's stronger than how I would put it -- it's plausible enough.

Shish2k
0 replies
27m

It wasn't a "sinking-ship podcast platform”

I think you may have missed the context for this thread :) You’re talking about reality - I’m talking about the hypothesis that Spotify chained Joe Rogan to their platform because they wanted him to drown, which implies not only that the platform is sinking, but that it’s doing so deliberately.

A4ET8a8uTh0
0 replies
5h46m

FWIW, there is rationale for platform to own content vs licensing deal that forces platform's hand to 'make unavailable' items their customers already purchased[1].

Not that I disagree with you.

[1]https://www.playstation.com/en-us/legal/psvideocontent/?et_r...

bluescrn
1 replies
8h55m

Elon paid vastly more for Twitter, seemingly primarily as an act of activism.

In this incredibly divided world, politics has started to come before profit.

Shish2k
0 replies
8h18m

And when they paid an additional several hundred million buying up tens of random science and tech news and D&D podcasts - was that to intentionally kill those podcasts too? Or were they just a necessary sacrifice in order to create a more believable “we want our product to succeed” fascade, so that Joe didn’t realise he was getting tricked?

stjohnswarts
0 replies
8h44m

paywall? all you have to do is sign up for the freemium version of spotify?

Roritharr
6 replies
9h2m

Would you say that about any other type of media/culture/art you dislike?

"I don't get why people like the Mona Lisa, the painting is neither original nor particularly well done"

Is just as much a subjective statement. JRE is, by most released figures the top interview podcast on the planet, his interviews regularly move Charts of third party media like Book Bestseller Lists and Music Charts.

There obviously is a huge audience and value there and I can only assume their agreement over 200M was based on some pretty solid math.

coryrc
4 replies
8h43m

I can only assume their agreement over 200M was based on some pretty solid math.

Working at Microsoft during the Ballmer era and seeing the number of multi-billion-dollar acquisitions written-down to nothing, I would never assume corporations spend large amounts wisely.

Roritharr
1 replies
8h33m

You certainly have a point there, but I also remember being absolutely wrong about the Minecraft aquisition which has now paid for itself multiple times.

Your math doesn't have to work out, even if it's solid.

mewpmewp2
0 replies
3h23m

Sometimes it's the case that you do 10 investments, each $1b where one makes you $100b. But in hindsight the 9 looked stupid, but at the time you were using the same strategy to do all the 10 investments.

Not sure if it's case with Joe Rogan, but just how sometimes there's a lot of failure, while the strategy itself is solid.

xdennis
0 replies
2h25m

I think, sometimes, buying the competition and killing it is the intended effect. Especially if you're as anti-competitive as Microsoft.

walteweiss
0 replies
6h36m

I will never understand why that idiot was hired as a CEO in the first place.

kvonhorn
0 replies
7h31m

"I don't get why people like the Mona Lisa, the painting is neither original nor particularly well done"

And it's so small, too.

baby
5 replies
9h13m

He’s a great podcaster.

epistasis
3 replies
9h2m

Good enough to bring in $200M of revenue through subscriptions or ads?

rowanG077
0 replies
8h37m

By definition he is since that is what spotify paid now.

rapsey
0 replies
8h48m

Unless Spotify releases numbers none of us have a clue. Considering his youtube numbers before the move, that number was actually him selling himself short.

anthonypasq
0 replies
1h41m

that wasnt the purpose of buying him. the purpose was to buy a gigantic audience of listeners that would hopefully now use spotify as their main podcast app

kvetching
0 replies
4h37m

He's really gone downhill lately. Looking really rough. And stoned on top of that. I wonder if he can even comprehend half of what his guests are saying.

10u152
5 replies
9h16m

You don’t listen to Joe Rogan to listen to Joe Rogan. You listen because he has the most interesting guests on.

anon23432343
3 replies
8h42m

And lets people spread fake news and stupid theories.

Just because they are "interesting" they should not get a free promo.

rowanG077
0 replies
8h35m

That's precisely what people like about it. Anyone can come on his show. No matter how batshit crazy. Many people don't want to be coddled and protected from viewpoints other people have decided are fake news or stupid. They can make up the balance themselves.

kvetching
0 replies
4h36m

That's your opinion. Most guests have a wealth of knowledge that shouldn't be discounted outright.

asynchronous
0 replies
48m

“But but misinfo!” Man I hate where we’re at for free speech in the West.

1letterunixname
0 replies
7h13m

Joe Rogan isn't an insightful, active listener like Charlie Rose was and with actual interesting guests at a higher signal level.

Shish2k
3 replies
9h9m

Are “it was a stupid decision to buy him” and “I don't get why people listen to him” supposed to be related statements? The business decision isn’t about your personal feelings, it’s about his objectively measurably enormous audience

anon23432343
2 replies
8h43m

I want to see how they got the 200 million back and as they have to lay off 17% of there people it looks like a stupid decision in the end.

rickdeckard
1 replies
7h56m

It's a ridiculous amount of money for that content.

But looking back at those days where all platform embraced a strategy to "own ALL content", I doubt that the 2nd-best offer was significantly less.

After all, they also paid him to NOT make any further money with the podcast on YouTube or other platforms...

lotsofpulp
0 replies
4h13m

But looking back at those days where all platform embraced a strategy to "own ALL content",

I don’t understand how that could have ever been a strategy without buying the businesses that own most of the popular music, such as Warner, Universal, and Sony.

stjohnswarts
0 replies
8h46m

It's simple, different people have different opinions in life and his show is still the most popular podcast on spotify. was it worth $200 million, I have my doubts on that one.

rowanG077
0 replies
8h38m

You don't watch Joe Rogan for Joe Rogan. You watch Joe Rogan for the guests. I love his episodes with Elon Musk.

eddtries
0 replies
5h13m

It’s light entertainment and he tends to cover topics I am interested in like BJJ/Muay Thai. If he goes on about Covid etc I just half listen, it’s rarely that long.

andsoitis
0 replies
3h18m

I don't get why people listen to him...

People have different tastes. That's OK.

The Joe Rogan Experience has continued to be at the top of Spotify's podcast charts, bringing in 11m listeners an episode. https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianbushard/2023/07/03/top-pod...

HideousKojima
0 replies
9h16m

It was and still is a stupid decision to buy Joe Rogan.

I don't get why people listen to him...

I think you just contradicted yourself here. Whether or not it was a stupid decision to buy the rights to his podcast is orthogonal to whether or not he's funny or smart or if his content gives "value" to listeners.

baby
15 replies
9h13m

I feel like you’re implying something but I don’t get it.

epistasis
8 replies
9h10m

The implication I see is that the $200M was not worth it.

I don't know their financials, but it seems quite unlikely that a single podcast would be worth that valuation.

rapsey
6 replies
8h34m

Rogan was not making that much less on youtube. Keep in mind pre-spotify he was literally making NFL numbers for listeners+viewers per episode.

vharish
4 replies
6h53m

I don't think he's that popular anymore.

mewpmewp2
1 replies
3h26m

According to Google Trends, he was more popular in 2020 to early 2022 with some wild spike there, but it seems stabilised for now, at similar rates as in 2018.

notyofriend
0 replies
2h21m

Less reach with Spotify

andsoitis
1 replies
3h10m

The Joe Rogan Experience is at the top of Spotify’s U.S. podcast charts, and had the biggest weekly audience in the U.S. so far this year, and is widely estimated to bring in 11 million listeners per episode.

His show is the top podcast worldwide on Spotify each of the last three years — nearly double the second-place podcast, true crime series Crime Junkie, which has an estimated 5.9 million listeners per episode.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianbushard/2023/07/03/top-pod...

teg4n_
0 replies
34m

could it be that people that want to listen to his show use spotify for only listening to his show and a real podcast app to listen to regular podcasts? if i was inclined to listen to rogan that’s what i would do.

mr90210
0 replies
3h10m

I personally think that he was better off pre-Spotify. Surely a bit of less money, but so does less drama. And Pre-Spotify he had the power to diversify himself in other platforms as well.

myvoiceismypass
0 replies
2h41m

People have been saying the same thing about Howard Stern and his very large Sirius contract. And yet, SiriusXM keeps re-signing him.

mvdtnz
5 replies
9h10m

To spell it out for you, $200 million could pay for well over 1,000 employee-years of salaries.

soderfoo
3 replies
3h50m

I get what you are saying but you would be surprised how fast financial forecasts balloon at scale.

200 developers @ $150k a year = $30M

$200M/$30M = 6.5 years

whiddershins
1 replies
3h22m

It’s also not $150k/year. Employees cost far more than their salary.

AdamN
0 replies
2h24m

Rule of thumb is double. So if you're average total comp is $150k then total cost for each of those employees is $300k/employee (office, expenses, HVAC, insurance, etc..)

SkyPuncher
0 replies
2h53m

I think you’re both saying the same thing. Op is saying 1 employee for 1 year is “1 employee-year”.

umanwizard
0 replies
4h16m

Companies exist to make money, not to be a charity for their employees.

loandbehold
6 replies
9h9m

Joe Rogan brings in 10s millions of listeners. On the other hand it's not clear what value those employees who were let go brought. The software behind Spotify is pretty generic. Listening experience isn't much different between say Spotify,YouTube Music and Amazon Music. Software engineers might not want to hear it, but content is more important than software used to consume it. Book vs book's cover.

epistasis
2 replies
8h59m

What revenue do these listeners bring?

loandbehold
1 replies
7h52m

Spotify makes money through ads for non-paying users and subscription fees from paying users. For non-paying users, time listened translates into ad impressions. New content also brings in new paid subscribers, as it makes subscription more valuable to the user allowing listening without ads.

whiddershins
0 replies
2h33m

Also, even when you pay, Rogan still has ads.

o-alex
1 replies
8h58m

A more suitable comparison would be between the book contents and the paper and fonts of the text. I don't know how much you would enjoy a book on bad paper and bad, barely legible text.

loandbehold
0 replies
7h50m

Yes, but printing book legibly is a solved problem. So all books in the bookstore are legible. Books are competing on content, not legibility.

mvdtnz
0 replies
9h5m

Joe Rogan brings in 10s millions of listeners

Has this ever been confirmed by Spotify?

TMWNN
6 replies
8h8m

Assuming that investing in Rogan did what Spotify hoped it would (driving enough subscriptions to make a profit), not having made the investment would have meant more layoffs now.

jzb
4 replies
4h40m

Opposite for me. I cancelled because of that. Partially because I didn’t like Spotify endorsing his content, but also because I subscribed to Spotify for music, not podcasts.

I wanted to see them invest more in features around music and work on better compensation for artists - not spend my subscription money on shoving podcast content at me.

slig
3 replies
2h24m

I wonder why they force podcasts so much. I've never listened to them, and I'm sure they have that data, and the recommendations are way, way off anything I'd consider listening to.

rightbyte
0 replies
2h12m

I guess they try to force it because they have higher margins on them.

Podcast are cheaper to produce and requires no record label sharing the profits with Spotify.

jzb
0 replies
1h19m

If they produce the podcast they don't have to pay royalties + they've aimed for exclusivity with them. They aren't going to have exclusivity with most music, so podcasts are an opportunity to bring in a new audience and lock them in.

That's, AIUI, the theory. Whether it works in practice is another story.

CSMastermind
0 replies
1h24m

Probably the same reason they're pushing so hard into audiobooks right now. They want to be a general audio platform instead of a music platform and there are significant network effects if they can pull it off which ultimately means more customers and a more sticky product.

madeofpalk
0 replies
3h38m

Why would you assume that?

bede
4 replies
8h58m

As a scientist working in public health, this decision burned my faith in Spotify. They were taking down conspiracy theory podcasts daily while bankrolling Rogan to provide a platform with insane reach for cranks like Robert Malone. I cancelled my subscription for a few months in protest.

starcraft2wol
0 replies
2h23m

I feel a lot of my faith in public health scientists was also burned.

slig
0 replies
2h26m

I cancelled my subscription for a few months in protest.

Good for you, I'm sure that made a huge impact.

massysett
0 replies
2h35m

"for a few months" - so you went back. Honest question - what is Spotify doing so well that you went back rather than just sticking with, say, Apple Music?

coldpie
0 replies
3h0m

for a few months

Heh. There's a zillion perfectly good competitors in this space. Why not just permanently switch to one that doesn't fund conspiracy theory wackos?

yourusername
1 replies
6h47m

At least Rogan is still one of the most popular podcasters in the world. They paid a similar ammount for Gimlet and that company is now completely defunct and all their hit podcasts either jumped ship or stopped. So that was probably a worse investment.

alecco
0 replies
2h58m

Or $25m (2019) for two podcasts featuring the Obamas. They didn't bother to make frequent appearances and attributed the poor audience figures to Spotify's exclusive rights.

rapsey
0 replies
9h12m

We will find out soon enough because his contract is running out.

kevinmchugh
0 replies
9h9m

Many of them probably came in during the same growth wave:

In 2020 and 2021, we took advantage of the opportunity presented by lower-cost capital and invested significantly in team expansion, content enhancement, marketing, and new verticals

There's no details here about which teams are effected. I imagine there's many old hands who see this as the inevitable end of an unnecessary conquer-the-world attempt

andsoitis
0 replies
3h20m

The Joe Rogan Experience has continued to be at the top of Spotify's podcast charts in 2023. It has the biggest weekly audience in the US (Edison Research) and is estimated to bring in 11 million listeners per episode.

It is also the top podcast worldwide on Spotify. Second place goes to Crime Junkie, which has half the listener numbers.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianbushard/2023/07/03/top-pod...

thiago_fm
37 replies
9h34m

They need a bigger cut. 17% will not have a big enough impact to its bottom line.

They need to have enough money to invest in other initiatives, as the business they are in is proven to be margin-thin.

Apple and Amazon will eventually eat Spotify given enough time, if they don't find a moat to be built

FirmwareBurner
11 replies
9h29m

>They need a bigger cut. 17% will not have a big enough impact to its bottom line.

What's stopping them from bigger cuts? We've seen that big SW products can run on lean teams(whatsapp, post-Musk Twitter) and we know many large tech companies are overloaded with way more workers than they need to run(Google), just because they could overhire when money was free.

>Apple and Amazon will eventually eat Spotify given enough time, if they don't find a moat to be built

What prevents Google from doing the same? They already have a large customer base in Android users.

csunbird
6 replies
9h26m

Google themselves? Given the popularity of the YouTube they should have won a decade ago, but they have not.

The inefficiency of Google always amazes me.

kevinmchugh
3 replies
9h15m

About a decade ago they had Google Music. A friend of mine really liked it. He was supposed to have a for-life price of $7/month (or something) and then they raised prices and failed to grandfather his price in. Being Google, there was no way for him to complain about this to them, so he cancelled and used a product he liked less, out of spite. At some point they launched a duplicative product, YouTube Music, which they later migrated all customers to.

So you know, the standard Google experience.

FirmwareBurner
2 replies
8h16m

>He was supposed to have a for-life price of $7/month

At this point, consumers should know that "for life price" is a scam to get gullible customers through the door and gain market share or collect user data. Just like with a Ponzi scheme, consumers should realize by now why such pricing is not sustainable long term due to inflation and other costs, and either the business will crash or they'll have to inevitably backtrack on that promise and raise prices to stay afloat. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

No excusing Google of this scam, but they only did what every other company with these kind of hollow promises did.

I vividly remember Cerberus on Android was selling one time licenses for life, only for them to backtrack on that years later and switch everyone to their subscription instead, publishing a letter along the lines of "sorry, we know it sucks, but the lifetime licenses we sold you are unsustainable financially for us, so we'll switch you to subscription UwU."

Same with Google's unlimited Photo storage.

kevinmchugh
1 replies
7h29m

My recollection is that others retained that price, it was a bug or oversight that caused him specifically to have the price increased.

I'm sure when they migrated users to YouTube Music they got rid of the special deal.

htrp
0 replies
3h10m

It's almost always for the lifetime of the product?

chewz
0 replies
9h23m

The inefficiency of Google always amazes me.

It's the kind of people they attract. IBM types...

FirmwareBurner
0 replies
9h22m

>The inefficiency of Google always amazes me.

As long as they have the cheat code for unlimited free money(ads) they can be as inefficient as they want.

fooker
2 replies
9h20m

For anything other than American and maybe European music, YouTube Music is so much better nowadays wrt availability. YouTube Music has stellar quality of recommendations too.

But Google could easily do a Google and sabotage the product at some point.

macrolime
1 replies
9h1m

YouTube Music still only has a tiny fraction of the music available on YouTube.

fooker
0 replies
1h17m

Everything in YouTube comes up when searched from YouTube Music.

wlesieutre
0 replies
9h21m

Google Play Music, YouTube Music, YouTube Music Premium, YouTube Red, now YouTube Premium.

Who knows what Google’s music play will be next year? Not Google. Media is second only to Messaging for their lack of a consistent long term strategy.

ardit33
6 replies
9h18m

17% is a huge cut. More than that and you end up damaging operations. Look what is happening to X / Twitter.

PS. Spotify had already two layoffs, once 6% in Jan 2023 and 2% in June. This combined seems like a 25% ish cut.

rapsey
3 replies
9h14m

It's seeing more use than ever with a fraction of the staff?

hackernewds
0 replies
9h1m

but is it growing? they have the privilege of maintaining an amazing product

epistasis
0 replies
9h4m

Unless they can somehow turn "use" into money, more use does nothing to help X as a company. And the prior method of turning use into money, advertisements, has been dropping like a rock due to the inability of the company to keep ads away from toxic content no advertiser would ever want their ads near.

Can't cut costs to profitability if you are cutting revenue faster than costs.

carb
0 replies
9h3m

- Features have to keep being deprecated because once they degrade it's too hard to fix.

- Use is only up when measuring metrics like "we hit our peak user-seconds" which only measures short term usage spikes and not longer time-scale sustaining metrics.

- Lack of diversity of users, instability of ads performance, and a CEO making antisemitic and anti-Palestinian claims has led to advertisers pausing Twitter ads at a high rate. Valuation has dropped to $10s of Billions instead of $44B.

- Small bugs never get fixed (on Firefox mobile if I accidentally hit the "Views" button on a tweet, the pop-up modal is inescapable and breaks my back button and tab state, so I have to open Twitter in a new tab.

toboche
1 replies
9h3m

Twitter doesn't have to pay the huge content fees as Spotify does.

puszczyk
0 replies
4h48m

They do have to payback the loans that were taken to do the leveraged buyout

surgical_fire
5 replies
9h23m

Apple and Amazon will eventually eat Spotify given enough time, if they don't find a moat to be built

I doubt it.

Apple is restricted to Apple devices. As for Amazon, the same argument could be made about Prime Video eating Netflix, and that never seemed to happen.

On top of that, as far as I know, Spotify is profitable.

vlovich123
1 replies
9h20m

Apple Music is not restricted to Apple devices afaik: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.andr...

surgical_fire
0 replies
9h16m

Oh wow, I didn't know that.

I still wouldn't use it, but I am surprised that I never knew of this.

anon23432343
1 replies
9h17m

You can listen to apple music even via web interface and it has an android app and works on android tv and android auto.

So pretty much everywhere.

jamespo
0 replies
7h3m

Can't listen natively on my lametric time!

Mindwipe
0 replies
9h13m

Spotify had one profitable quarter by fluke. It's not profitable.

konschubert
4 replies
9h10m

Why do they need to invest?

They can also just keep being the most complete music streaming service.

That is a low margin business, but it’s a business, and you probably don’t need a lot of people to run it.

hackernewds
2 replies
9h3m

their moat is exploiting the copyright system with monopolistic contracts with record labels

piva00
0 replies
8h54m

Explain. Because as far as I'm aware all of the record labels have deals with all music distributors (it doesn't make sense not to, they are in the business of showcasing their copyrighted properties), you can even distribute instantly to all streaming services through labels and distributors.

I don't think you know what you're talking about...

konschubert
0 replies
8h56m

Monopolistic how?

i386
0 replies
9h8m

Using Apple Music on a few Google devices now.

pembrook
3 replies
8h54m

Before trialing the iTunes franken-nightmare that is Apple Music, I would have probably agreed with you.

However, after that experience, I'm starting to think there's no way in hell a massive multi-product conglomerate like Apple/Amazon is going to overtake a single-product music streamer like Spotify.

Apple/Amazon are clearly stretched too thin, and in a worse strategic position on audio due to the way the licensing agreements shook out. In music, everybody basically has access to the same catalog on every platform.

And given that songs are 4 minutes long (vs 4 hours binging TV shows), you spend wayyy more time interacting with the software in audio vs. video. So in audio, it's purely just deciding which UI/features you like best.

Spotify seems to be trying its best to screw up the UI, but no way it ever gets as bad as Apple Music given that's their only meal ticket.

chewz
1 replies
6h53m

However, after that experience, I'm starting to think there's no way in hell a massive multi-product conglomerate like Apple/Amazon is going to overtake a single-product music streamer like Spotify.

Amazon Music Unlimited is very neat experience compared to Spotify... Good catalogue (for me), better music quality and it's app is just plain, boring music player not something neurotic like Spotify...

ryanSrich
0 replies
4h50m

The one thing I could not figure out about Amazon music is that when I would type in an album, and start playing it, the songs would reshuffle based on which songs I would listen to the most. It drove me insane, and caused me to cancel the trial before it was even up. I couldn't figure out how to play an album in the actual order of the album. Dumbest feature I've seen in a product, maybe ever.

thewildginger
0 replies
8h35m

This is an anecdote, and maybe it's just coincidental timing, but these kinds of operational choices do not work well in a company focused on a single product across multiple devices. Losing so many workers so quickly means a loss in productivity on the issues the platform has, and Spotify has many. Since November there has been an issue on PS5 where any podcast over an hour will not play on PlayStation(so, basically all podcasts). People have figured out the issue, and Spotify has not moved on it.

When you offer a single service and the benefit is being device agnostic, "cutting costs" by wasting time hiring people you probably didn't need to hire only to fire them a year or two later means an amplified disruption that will lose customers.

But hey, board members who jerk each other off once a month in a conference call who are already rich made a little more money by hiring a bunch of people only to fire them later and at a huge operational waste.

This is how our world works and it's bs.

s3p
1 replies
3h26m

Moat??? Spotify has the largest userbase period. Paying or non paying. Apple and Google haven’t been able to take their market share.

acdha
0 replies
2h48m

How much profit does Apple make versus Spotify per user? Android has had a larger user base but that hasn’t made it more profitable.

dboreham
0 replies
2h29m

Perhaps this cut is a precursor to being acquired by someone like Apple?

mtlmtlmtlmtl
35 replies
9h9m

I often wonder what kind of work actually happens at Spotify. Pretty much every major change to the software or api since I started using it has made the product worse.

Breaking libspotify, pointless UI redesigns, obvious, user-facing bugs that go unfixed for years. Removing features like play queue for long periods. There's metadata errors and even audio corruption in some albums that I actually reported to them years ago, never fixed.

As for new features, there may be more but the only one I noticed somewhat recently was the ability to view lyrics at least for some songs, and sometimes but not always synced to the music. But this was already an add-on for Spotify wayyy back in their original client, and then they axed add-on support! This feature was gone for years after that.

I'm legitimately curious at this point what people actually do at Spotify besides billing and accounting.

mlrtime
11 replies
4h16m

I think this is the issue. 10,000 employees vs bad user experience.

Spotify has gotten worse for me as well, I pay for Spotify + SiriusXM. Spotify should be much better, but it's not. I'm thinking of dropping it soon.

Why doesn't Spotify still not have a Pandora style radio station? I just want to create 5 or 10 statiosn that auto pick based on certain criteria, does this exist?

erellsworth
3 replies
2h52m

I'm not sure how specific you want your criteria to be, but you can create a Spotify "radio" station based off of any song, band/artist, or playlist. Spotify's discovery capabilities are miles beyond Pandora, in my opinion.

sometdog
2 replies
1h22m

They removed the ability to create "radio" stations off of playlists, which does make discovery somewhat more difficult.

erellsworth
0 replies
1h15m

Oh man, I didn't know they did that. Lame.

erellsworth
0 replies
1h8m

Looks like they replaced it with the "smart shuffle" feature.

chinchilla2020
1 replies
1h41m

Why doesn't Spotify still not have a Pandora style radio station? I just want to create 5 or 10 statiosn that auto pick based on certain criteria, does this exist?

Spotify does have this. They've had it forever. It automatically happens after listening to a song you like, or you can make a playlist and generate a radio off of it.

The recommendations are so far ahead of pandora it's like the difference between AIM chatbots and GPT-4. I use spotify but my boat friend uses pandora when we go out and I am astonished by how bad the matching on it is.

dom96
0 replies
1h15m

In my experience the recommendations are always converging to songs I've already listened to hundreds of times.

prox
0 replies
3h9m

This is why I went with Apple Music. Apple being a hardware company first makes it that they just want to provide a good portal to music. Thus far I have been happy with it.

delfinom
0 replies
1h26m

My condolences for when you try to cancel SiriusXM one day.

coldpie
0 replies
2h55m

Just try a different service. There's a zillion of them out there, all more or less interchangeable. Maybe one has the feature you want.

code_runner
0 replies
1h28m

even though I primarily use spotify for podcasts, the radio functionality is something I've used for like.... 8 years

apwell23
0 replies
3h5m

I just want to create 5 or 10 statiosn that auto pick based on certain criteria, does this exist?

Can you describe the criteria ?

adamhp
7 replies
1h37m

I don't work for and am not affiliated with Spotify in any way, but I can honestly say Spotify has added more value to my life than almost any other app I have downloaded. I have discovered so much music that I genuinely adore. It's honestly mind-boggling. I'm so excited to open up my Discover Weekly. I'm very grateful for the work that has gone into their curation of certain playlists and of the similarity scoring they are doing because my musical perspective has broadened tremendously since I regularly started listening to my Discover Weekly.

Again, sounds like I'm some secret corporate shill or something but I truly am just genuinely appreciative of the service.

dbrueck
3 replies
1h26m

I'm in both camps: Spotify is hands down the best ROI for me in terms of where my streaming dollars go.

OTOH, it drives me crazy that customers like myself have been begging them for many years to add basic features like remembering my spot in a playlist.

fundatus
2 replies
1h20m

remembering my spot in a playlist

Can you elaborate? Seriously curious how that exactly would look like.

vvillena
0 replies
18m

Maybe a "resume" button next to the "play" button in the playlist page. Or just an option hidden in the "..." menu.

dbrueck
0 replies
53m

It's the equivalent of an automatic bookmark in book reader apps. While playing songs in a playlist, there is a tiny bit of state information - primarily what song you're on. As soon as you play something else, that state is discarded. There's no way to automatically pick up where you left off.

For example, I really enjoy curated playlists, and some of them are really long. I'd love the ability to work my way through a playlist but also be able to take a break and listen to something else. Or to go to the gym and listen to other music while I'm there. Or temporarily stop and listen to a new song a friend shared. None of these scenarios work very well currently.

Spotify already stores and syncs playlist name/ID/owner/etc. All I want is for them to add 2-3 bytes of sync'd data - just store the current sort field, sort direction, and a song index. It'd be totally fine if it didn't remember playlist state if you're on shuffle play.

mholm
0 replies
59m

I agree with you, but these features have been around for years. music radios, discover weekly, their premade mixes. Spotify has genuinely great recommendation algorithms. But they've had them the whole time. I don't know what they've been doing for the past few years, but I haven't seen any additional value add. They still don't even support Airplay 2.

maxverse
0 replies
21m

Yeah, both are true for me. I love Spotify, and the app is getting worse. They got rid of the "make a radio from a playlist" feature, which made no sense to me - the tech is there. Instead, they're suggesting the "Enhance Playlist"/"Smart Shuffle" features, which are worse. Making radio from playlists was a major feature for me, and I really miss it. I have no idea why it's gone.

cm277
0 replies
40m

Same here. My Spotify Premium sub will is the last one I would give up (after Netflix, or Apple, or Google). I got thousands of hours per year listening (yes, including podcasts) and so do lots of other people I know.

Spotify is basically "audio" for hundreds of millions of people. Think about that: a single app that defines/owns one entire medium. Yet, they haven't been profitable, ever. That's the problem and should probably be fixed with regulation: to enable streaming, the music industry has made sure the streamers get a tiny slice of the value-add. Which leaves room for exactly one, barely surviving, pure audio streamer, and then a bunch of subsidized side-bets of the monsters (Apple, Amazon, Youtube).

scarab92
4 replies
7h40m

All the pointless redesigns was a pretty clear sign that they had excess engineering headcount.

fullshark
2 replies
2h59m

I saw it as a sign that they needed to find ways to get people to spend time listening to anything that is proprietary (podcasts, unique recommendation algorithms) to avoid just being the middle man for music streaming and getting squeezed by the publishers for all their revenue.

Edit: By proprietary I mean - owned by Spotify.

rightbyte
1 replies
2h21m

The music is propertiary. Even recordings of Mozart is unless the recording is older than an ever increasing limit of a bazillion years.

fullshark
0 replies
2h18m

Yeah but it's not owned by Spotify, at least the most popular music isn't. I mean: they want you to listen to things they own, not things they license.

apwell23
0 replies
1h48m

It wasn't pointless. Spotify's whole existence depends on moving from background listening to active foreground use.

It would be pointless for them to stay an passive background app. Might as well shutdown the company and cut the losses.

alephnan
1 replies
3h6m

There was a meme about Spotify replacing the heart symbol to like a song with a ‘+’ sign.

No one asked for, it benefits no one, and people proactively want the old version.

I’m sure they had countless meetings for this “feature” and how much human hours. There would have been a designer, and a researcher. There would have also been a data scientist lying with statistics about how this change moved the core business metrics.

That’s from my personal experience of working in FANG and people doing unscientific and statistically invalid analysis of noise.

CoastalCoder
0 replies
1h15m

This change reminds me of Netflix replacing their 5(?)-star rating system, with a simple thumbs up / down system.

Netflix claimed there was statistical justification for the change, but my most charitable interpretation is that their goals don't align with mine.

RamblingCTO
1 replies
3h32m

I still hate the change about the "add to playlist/like" button with all my heart. I don't want to like all the songs I add to playlists. I have a few hundred playlists with a looooot of songs (I listened to 86000 minutes last year of over 4000 artists ...). That change was utterly idiotic

mrWiz
0 replies
1h15m

I've always used that button to "like" songs and used the "Add To Playlist" item under the ellipses menu to add things to a particular playlist. What was your process like before the change, and what is it now?

wombat-man
0 replies
2h56m

I think it's a lot of small changes being a/b tested. Stuff that you might or might not notice/see. But if it passes the test it's there forever. I'd guess the general goal is to first get you to use spotify more but more importantly get you to listen to content they don't have to pay to license like podcasts and whatnot.

that_guy_iain
0 replies
9h4m

I would assume it's mostly optimisation and bug fixing. Improving their ability to read files globally, improving availability, etc.

Plus internal tools will probably be a major thing too.

jzb
0 replies
2h14m

I'm guessing there's a lot of work at Spotify that goes into anti-copying efforts, for one thing. If the API and clients behave the same way for an extended period, it gets too easy to have spotify downloaders that work reliably for a larger audience. (I realize these things exist and work, but it remains enough of a moving target to keep it from pissing off Spotify's label/music publishing partners too much.)

There's also maintenance for all their platforms, which expands a bit every year. When I first started using Spotify smart speakers weren't a thing yet, and the number of OSes and streaming devices have only increased since. They have to maintain updates for various releases of macOS, Windows, iOS, iPadOS, Roku, etc. No doubt they encounter plenty of bugs that need addressing on those platforms...

They also have to have people negotiating rights for all the regions / countries they do business in, deal with fraud, and all that nonsense.

And they have to keep up social and advertising to compete with all the other streaming music and podcasting platforms. They have editorial needs - maintaining the artist pages and all the incoming new music, building playlists, etc.

Assuming Spotify offers this info in the appropriate languages by country, that's probably not an insubstantial number of people to ensure that you have pages for each artist translated into Spanish, French, Italian, German, Chinese, Japanese, and on and on. Spotify is available in a lot of countries, if they actually offer the interface and content in half of the primary languages for those countries it's going to be a lot of work. (I doubt they attempt to translate lyrics across the board, that would be an extremely heavy lift...)

That's not to say that Spotify doesn't have some unnecessary staff, but there's probably a lot of behind-the-scenes work aside from accounting and such that people don't think about.

jpalawaga
0 replies
2h50m

The start a jam and speaker sharing functionality is partly new and partly old. What is definitely new is that it works well now and doesn’t glitch out.

For better or for worse, Spotify has a lot of customized playlists. At some point, the “workout” playlist playlist stopped being a regular global playlist and started being one customized for individual users.

Their “keep playing more like this” functionality that takes over after the playlist ends is quite good, as is smart shuffle which will mix in tracks that “belong” in the playlist even.

Some songs will play artist uploaded music videos when you play their songs. Their “now playing” widget now shows a larger album art and background information about the band.

I don’t know what happened to the lyrics all of those years, but I’m guessing it was a licensing issue. A random add on is different from first party application support for all of your users, globally.

It’s possible you don’t use any of this and think it’s a waste of time. That’s fine. I think Spotify is seamlessly stitching in extra functionality in non-annoying ways, which I like.

gizajob
0 replies
2h51m

If you have too many UI designers, you’re going to get a lot of UI redesigns. Probably whole devs working on one button each getting laid off today and in future.

emodendroket
0 replies
1h52m

Spotify works on like a million different devices for one thing.

nojvek
21 replies
2h34m

Post-pandemic, the trend of Corporations raking in higher and higher profits, while needing fewer and fewer staff scares me.

The most obvious and likely outcome is it drastically separates the ultra wealthy from middle class.

With rise of AI and automation, that trend will likely accelerate. The top 10% hold more than 50% of wealth. It's likely in a few decades, the top 1% will hold more than 50% of the wealth. They already hold 28% of wealth.

https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2022/10/the-wealthiest-0-1-o...

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=UdXz

lettergram
11 replies
2h22m

The poor today are the middle class of 15-20 years ago and the kings of 300 years ago.

It’s not perfect but a rising tide does raise all ships.

Regarding the ultra wealthy, the disparity was actually greater in the past.

All that said, you distribute wealth by reducing taxes on the poor and increasing it on wealthy. Alternatively, shifting the growth differential such that the poor grow faster than the wealthy (hard in a capitalistic economy). That said, I don’t see the wealth disparity as a problem itself; if you have the top 1% gain more wealth but it’s easier to become the top 1% or the top 1% rotates out often it’s probably better

sydbarrett74
3 replies
2h1m

People are better off in absolute terms, yes. That is incontrovertible.

What matters to the human psyche is relative well-being compared to one's peers. And by those measures, the 'middle class' is demonstrably worse off than 50 years ago.

BurningFrog
1 replies
1h39m

What matters to the human psyche is relative well-being compared to one's peers

Like it or not, that's how we primates work, yes.

Of course, in aggregate that distribution never changes. If you or your group gets lower status, someone else gets higher. It's a true zero sum game. And half of us will always be below average.

alexanderchr
0 replies
1h15m

No this is not correct. Half of us will always be below the mean, this much is true, but we can obviously do something about the spread of the distribution.

avgcorrection
0 replies
1h45m

People are better off in absolute terms, yes. That is incontrovertible.

That people are better off now than 15–20 years ago (see OP) is absolutely not obvious.

What matters to the human psyche is relative well-being compared to one's peers.

Uh, see the Neoliberal shift that happened some decades ago. Things got worse. The rich got richer and the rest got poorer.

This isn’t some psyche thing for crying in the sink.

rorroe53
1 replies
1h57m

Middle class 15-20 years ago was able to buy, or even finance building of their own houses. How many poor you know who do that?

Only thing that has really improved is access to cheap Made in China goods, and perhaps plane tickets. But actual necessities like housing are becoming more and more unaffordable.

apwell23
0 replies
1h50m

But actual necessities like housing are becoming more and more unaffordable.

That has to do with supply restrictions with NIMBY and environmet regulatory capture by nimbies. Blame your local boomer neighbor not a billionaire.

gusgus01
1 replies
2h7m

The poor of today (2023) are the middle class of 2003-2008? That's a hard comparison with the housing crash of 2008, but I don't think the tide has risen enough for that comparison to be accurate.

freedomben
0 replies
1h50m

Yeah I agree, I don't think that's true overall.

Maybe in some very small senses, like many of the poor today have iPhones, which are way more capable than even the middle class phones of mid 00s. But yeah middle class in the mid 00s owned a decent house. Most of those houses haven't changed much since then.

butlike
0 replies
54m

"a rising tide raises all ships." What happens to the ships when the proverbial glass runneth over?

KineticLensman
0 replies
2h11m

a rising tide does raise all ships

The thing that has always bothered me about this analogy is that a sea level rise affects all ships uniformly while the magnification of wealth doesn't. It's more like everyone standing on a plain and then the centre deforms upwards, creating a peak of wealth while most people are on the (only slightly higher) foothills.

CodeMage
0 replies
2h2m

The poor today are the middle class of 15-20 years ago and the kings of 300 years ago.

I've yet to hear this claim from someone who has been truly poor at least once in their life. When you have to live paycheck to paycheck, and stress out every single month over the uncertainty, not knowing if you'll be able to pay the bills and have enough to eat, let me know if you feel like "the king of 300 years ago".

TexanFeller
2 replies
2h28m

Things are probably just going back to normal. Companies went on hiring binges while unprecedented cash was pumped into the economy and interest rates were historically low. Now that all that is being walked back employment levels are going back to 2019 or a bit before.

eastbound
1 replies
54m

How is that different than the IMF pumping cash in 1998 into the Russia economy, only so that private companies take the profits and create oligarchs and various lords, who then emigrated to the French Riviera with women who became widows there, empoverishing the Russian land even further, as shows by the economist Joseph Stieglitz in his book Globalization and its Discontents?

SpicyLemonZest
0 replies
46m

Presumably it’s different because the point of the cash was to support people whose livelihoods were disrupted by the pandemic?

next_xibalba
1 replies
2h24m

Corporations raking in higher and higher profits,

To what is this claim responding? Spotify only turned a profit in 1 of the last 5 quarters. It has never turned an annual profit.

I actually think the story is quite different here. Tech companies had been hiring like drunken sailors leading up to the pandemic. They're only in the last year rationalizing down to levels that are necessary and productive. I have close friends at a few FAANGs and the stories of bureaucracy, bloat, and entitlement are mind blowing. Meta/Facebook made the right move by taking a hatchet to middle management. Let's hope the other big ones do the same before the plague spreads further.

apwell23
0 replies
1h53m

Meta/Facebook made the right move by taking a hatchet to middle management.

They are all back( layer reduction was never really done in practice). It was just a dog and pony show. Meta is hiring aggressively again and middle management is bloated than ever before.

marcosdumay
0 replies
1h2m

Short term profits are almost completely defined by historic investment (and thus, historic staff).

How long term profits will react to those changes is entirely still to be seen. There's nothing telling you profits will get higher and higher, or that they will diminish, or anything else.

emodendroket
0 replies
1h55m

They’re not “taking in higher and higher profits” so much as abandoning speculative investments.

cglan
0 replies
2h28m

isnt this just massive overhiring due to free money during the pandemic? Not sure this is an example of needing fewer and fewer stuff. Spotify is just not profitable except barely like 1 quarter

Aurornis
0 replies
2h26m

The pandemic trend at many of these companies was to aggressively overhire. If you look at headcount for many of these companies it’s still significantly above 2020 levels and even often above the old trend lines.

If you hire an unprecedented number of people in short period of time, you’re almost always going to have to cut a significant number of them later. Hiring is hard and even during good times a rapid expansion like we saw during COVID hiring is going to bring in people and departments that don’t work out.

The most obvious and likely outcome is it drastically separates the ultra wealthy from middle class.

I think this doesn’t obviously follow. Like I said, hiring trends aren’t all that distorted if you average out the recent layoffs with the excessive COVID hiring.

rob74
19 replies
9h19m

Yet, considering the gap between our financial goal state and our current operational costs, I decided that a substantial action to rightsize our costs was the best option to accomplish our objectives.

or, otherwise said: "we fired you to make our bottom line look nicer"

surgical_fire
10 replies
9h13m

Er... There's nothing wrong with that. I mean, we do live in a world where businesses are supposed to be profitable. Companies hire and companies fire, that is part of the deal.

One thing is to have layoffs when you are raking in record profits. This doesn't seem to be the case. The text makes a decent enough case.

hackernewds
8 replies
9h8m

sure, but call a spade a spade instead of making the layoffs seem mandatory. there are inputs to financial goals - including executive greed.

rob74
2 replies
8h35m

Or stock market greed... of course, if you subscribe to the "greed is good" school of thought, you may also see that as positive.

umanwizard
0 replies
4h12m

Not sure if I’d go so far as saying “greed is good”, but if it weren’t for the expectation by investors that companies would attempt to be as profitable as possible, companies like Spotify wouldn’t exist.

lotsofpulp
0 replies
3h23m

Spotify stock has lost 10% per year relative to SP500 (riskless). It is crazy to call not wanting to lose 10% per year “greedy”.

lotsofpulp
2 replies
3h24m

What would your plan be to stop Spotify from losing tens and hundreds of millions of Euros per year?

rchaud
1 replies
2h6m

Raise prices to a point where the company can be a going concern without needing to find new financing to buy every podcast under the sun.

Spotify is one of the few companies that raises prices every year but somehow get further away from making a profit.

lotsofpulp
0 replies
1h22m

Their competition, Apple, Alphabet, and Amazon, sets the price above which Spotify becomes unattractive to many. Streaming audio is a pretty low barrier to entry and fungible business. And Apple can bundle it with iCloud, Alphabet can bundle it with YouTube, and Amazon can bundle it with prime.

styren
1 replies
6h18m

Well, if they determine that firing 17% of staff will lead to greater profits then it seems pretty mandatory based on his fiduciary duty to the board.

acdha
0 replies
2h58m

That’s mythology: executives have no such obligation to either shareholders or the board because business decisions are very rarely unambiguous wins or losses, and a great deal of discretion is given to their judgement over any non-trivial timeframe.

Consider, for example, the number of people who thought turn of the century Apple should become a Windows reseller or, later, sell the iPod brand to a business which understood how to be successful in the phone market like Nokia. There were certainly times where that could have generated a great deal of short-term gain, and it was easy to find some analyst prattling on about why they had to do it.

In the case of Spotify, the only situation where 17% of their company is an unambiguous waste of money with no benefit to the future business should be accompanied by the CEO’s resignation because that would be an enormous managerial failure in the hiring process. Since it seems unlikely that even 1% of their workforce is that bad, it’s far more likely that this has nothing to do with long-term success and everything to do with pleasing the activist investors and consulting firms who’ve been pushing the idea of layoffs as a way to remind workers not to ask for more.

chii
0 replies
9h8m

One thing is to have layoffs when you are raking in record profits.

if the future prospects of the business doesn't look great despite the current record profits, a layoff is also not a bad decision. There's no reason why an employee is kept if that employee's work is not going to generate future profits. Current profits are already generated from past work of said employee.

TapWaterBandit
5 replies
9h16m

Eh, what's the alternative? Some people have this weird attitude that businesses are not allowed to shrink/fail. Businesses can only ever go one direction and that is more headcount, otherwise give them govt bailout.

Businesses need to be able to grow and shrink. Otherwise we just end up with "too big to fail".

robin_reala
2 replies
9h13m

I don’t think the complaint was in the action, but the horrible wording.

epistasis
1 replies
9h12m

I'm not sure which of the wordings is supposed to be worse. They are both bad. But that is the nature of a company on the edge of survival.

hackernewds
0 replies
9h7m

Spotify is not merely surviving. They have numerous monopolistic exclusive contracts and paid $200M for Joe Rogan's podcast. Be the judge on whether that's worth 1500 employees keeping their job

marcosdumay
0 replies
50m

Well, IMO they have a duty to not be frivolous on firing.

It must not be something impossible to do, but it must be hard. And they should favor most other courses of action.

But anyway, it's up to the government to enforce this, and the US (where they are hosted) seems to almost completely disagree. So we get those companies hiring like mad, just to fire like mad in a couple of years, and begin the cycle again a few years down.

acdha
0 replies
2h49m

It’s not that businesses can never shrink but that it should be considered and linked to a specific reason (e.g. a change in business strategy or consumer preferences). If they were, say, RIM a decade ago, layoffs would make sense once they had no path back into the consumer market and also were bleeding cash to the point where they soon wouldn’t be able to make payroll. When the Cold War ended, manufacturing layoffs were inevitable at some of the big defense contractors because the market for stealthy aircraft shrunk and nobody else needed to buy them.

A layoff this large means one of two things: the management screwed up on an epic scale (and should be the first to go) or it’s just giving investors a short-term stock boost at the expense of long-term success. Broad layoffs are usually bad for companies long-term because they signal both a lack of management skills and mean that everyone still working there is going to be worried about another round, so politics and making yourself harder to replace will consume a certain amount of otherwise productive time.

make3
0 replies
9h12m

? it's a normal capitalist corporation, what exactly did you expect

dehrmann
0 replies
9h4m

That's not wrong, but they also hired-up for a new podcast business that wasn't as successful as they hoped.

that_guy_iain
11 replies
9h2m

Super good time to announce layoffs, at the start of the month where everyone is preparing for time off and holidays.

switch007
6 replies
5h8m

It’s unfortunately common when financial end of year is around the same time.

Announced now, people can at least try to scale back Christmas and NYE plans if necessary.

that_guy_iain
4 replies
4h56m

How many people will be getting told they're part of it? I would suspect this will be hanging over their heads as an unknown element. Is it even possible for HR to manage off-boarding 17% of the company within a month?

switch007
3 replies
4h45m

From the article:

Earlier today, CEO Daniel Ek shared the following note about the company’s organizational changes with all Spotify employees.

...

you will receive a calendar invite within the next two hours from HR for a one-on-one conversation. These meetings will take place before the end of the day on Tuesday
that_guy_iain
2 replies
4h31m

I saw that but I honestly don't think it's possible for HR to handle about 1,500 off-boarding meetings within 2 days.

apwell23
1 replies
3h2m

Those meetings are just formality. your fate is already sealed.

that_guy_iain
0 replies
2h45m

Exactly a formality, something that has to be done. How are they going to handle that in 48 hours? To me, it's a sign that some people get to know straight away and some will find out later.

maxehmookau
0 replies
2h11m

Something I'm sure their CEO will do out of kindness and solidarity. /s

How depressing.

1letterunixname
3 replies
7h9m

Yep. Maximizing fuck-over of employees.

Tech workers need to stop working for corporations they don't own, aren't seeing the profits of, and who will just throw them away at any moment. The solution are businesses in the form of employee-owned co-ops and organized labor.

piyuv
0 replies
4h58m

I’m in full support. But, you do realize the forum you’re writing this in, right?

matchbok
0 replies
2h50m

Or Spotify could have not taken the risk a couple years ago and never hired them. Which is what would have happened in your scenario. (No dynamism)

Businesses take risks. Part of that includes hiring people for things that may not work out. It's really not that hard.

And "fuck-over"? Please. 5 months of salary with no work? Actual working class people would go nuts for that. Get a reality check bud.

lotsofpulp
0 replies
3h20m

Tech workers are one of the few W2 employees to see any profits from ownership, hence the compensation in RSUs and stock options. Also, anyone with investments in the public equity markets (like most tech workers earning high salaries) receives gains from the profits.

techstacktoe
11 replies
9h34m

All things considered, the note seems honest - lays out the facts and considerations. The severance package seems quite generous as well.

Epa095
7 replies
8h55m

The severance package seems quite generous as well.

I guess it depends a bit what they mean by `the average employee receiving approximately five months of severance` (and also where you are seeing it from, maybe its seen as more generous when seen from the US). In Sweeden the notice period for the employer is between 1 and 6 months, depending on how long the empoyee has worked there. If they count that period in as part of the severance package, it could wery well be "the legal minimum" or "the legal minimum + 2 months", which sounds less great than 5 months :-p

If its "the legal minimum + approximately 5 months" then it's generous.

In the other developer-downscalings I know about here in Scandinavia (Norway if it matters) the most common deal has been 6 months, either "work for the remaining notice period, then 6 months pay" or "6 months pay, you work out the current month". I say "deal", because its a deal where the employee gets that pay, and then resigns voluntarily. If they don't take the deal they only receive the legal minimum, but they can then fight the firering, which can get expensive and complicated (I have never heard about anyone not taking the deal).

thelastknowngod
6 replies
6h55m

Yeah you're not entitled to anything in the States. There are no employment contracts and you can be fired for any reason without notice. The only reason to give severance is to avoid bad publicity. There isn't any mandate that the company has to offer anything.

There really should be though especially when the company in question was able to afford $1 billion in stock buybacks just 2 years ago, and when the CEO has a $3 billion net worth, and when they are well known for not paying their suppliers (the artists) a fair price for the content they create.

relativ575
2 replies
3h58m

There are no employment contracts and you can be fired for any reason without notice.

You can also leave the job at any time, which as a frequent HN user I'm sure you know and may have used it to your advantage.

There really should be though especially when the company in question was able to afford $1 billion in stock buybacks just 2 years ago, and when the CEO has a $3 billion net worth

They were also in a hiring spree 2 years ago, like many tech companies. Many of the current employees wouldn't have a job otherwise.

The CEO is also the founder of the company, who built it over time from scratch. There have been many ups and downs during their 17 year history. 10,000 jobs didn't appear overnight. We hardly hear when company hire, only when they let people go.

and when they are well known for not paying their suppliers (the artists) a fair price for the content they create.

Apparently they don't make big fat profit given this layoff

UncleMeat
1 replies
3h28m

The employer/employee relationship is imbalanced. The ability to leave jobs instantly is not equivalently powerful as the ability to fire people instantly. A corporation that loses an employee suddenly is typically disrupted in a very minor way. A person that loses their job instantly might not make rent next month.

lucaspm98
0 replies
2h43m

That may be true in aggregate, but for tech workers over the past 20 years the scales have been as heavily in their favor as any industry's employer/employee relationship potentially ever.

sgerenser
0 replies
1h52m

In the U.S. the WARN act does mandate 60 day notice for layoffs over a certain size. In practice, (at least with many of the recent tech layoffs) you get 60 days on-payroll during which you don’t have to do any work. Severance after that is optional but often still paid, again at least among tech companies. ~2 weeks per year of service is common, although some have offered more than that.

Sparkle-san
0 replies
2h5m

That's not entirely true, the US has the WARN act which requires 60 days notice for large layoffs.

RugnirViking
0 replies
3h14m

for context in case you missed it, Spotify are headquatered in Sweden. Hence the GP's comment about it potentially being the legal minimum they are allowed to give.

vsnf
0 replies
9h25m

Written with a first-person active voice too, unlike many bureaucratic notes.

I have made the difficult decision to reduce our total headcount by approximately 17% across the company.
surgical_fire
0 replies
9h19m

Agreed. And the considerations they made seem to be factual too.

I think this was the first corporate notice about layoffs that didn't read like absolute bullshit.

pcurve
0 replies
2h3m

I agree, but this part bothered me.

"Today, we still have too many people dedicated to supporting work and even doing work around the work rather than contributing to opportunities with real impact. More people need to be focused on delivering for our key stakeholders – creators and consumers. "

While this is likely partly true, this is mostly management's fault. I didn't see anything in the email that talks post-mortem about the root cause and how it will be prevented going forward.

Hakeemmidan
10 replies
2h53m

Why do these mass layoffs keep happening in the software industry? Or is this a global phenomenon that exists across all industries?

adam_arthur
3 replies
1h39m

Software companies are pretty uniquely positioned such that they have far more employees than are operationally necessary.

Not to say that those employees don't provide value, but the spread between operationally stable employment levels and current headcount is far wider than other industries.

Thus, more potential for large cuts.

Solvency
2 replies
1h29m

Ok but why?

delfinom
0 replies
1h22m

During COVID, software companies massively overhired, because the executives in charge went all "hurr durr, digital is the future boys! Nobody is going outside anymore!". Not to mention the government was handing out money like candy through various schemes complete with low interest rates. I believe Facebook (as example) alone went from a headcount from 40k to over 80k employees in just 2 years of COVID.

2022+ was the "return to normal" with online trends quickly reverting back to pre-COVID levels. This resulted in a sudden drop in online economics (such as ad spend) that could justify the bloated workforces.

Drastically increased interest rates to fight inflation also cut off the cheap money flow to companies that would previously burn it like crazy on "R&D" and the like.

adam_arthur
0 replies
1h12m

Because margin on core software products tends to be far higher than other industries.

For example, retailers tend to have single digit margins. Software products often have 50%+ and sometimes 70%+.

Thus lots of excess money to hire people that aren't necessarily operationally critical.

A retailer with a large excess of store associates would fail quickly, whereas a software company can often survive in perpetuity

ulfw
2 replies
2h52m

Only to a small extend. Mostly it happens in software. And no it's not just "overhiring" (that doesn't happen across so many industries). That's only part of it. We all know with AI we won't need white collar jobs anymore. If I had children I wouldn't allow them to study CS. Not anymore.

vlowrian
0 replies
2h35m

I feel like you're overestimating the impact of AI on the current wave of dismissals. It's hard to say without any actual data, but there seems to be a lot of FUD regarding AI replacing white-collar and CS jobs.

I don't have better data than you, but I'd be very much surprised if AI would replace computer scientists rather than being a tool which will change what we'll have to be good at as computer scientists.

There is a lot of digitalisation to be done and AI might change the price of doing that, but it won't make a whole academic discipline obsolete.

thepablohansen
0 replies
2h49m

What would you have them study instead? If you're optimizing for what AI is least likely to be able to accomplish, some forms of blue collar labor would probably rank highest on the list.

whatyesaid
0 replies
2h41m

A lot of these companies have people doing no real work, even afterwards of layoffs, they're bloated. You can't layoff essential people otherwise you die.

You can look at companies like Spotify and Twitter, they ship like one feature a year if you average.

fullshark
0 replies
2h20m

It's the end of the internet service software business cycle. This plus a ton of unprofitable VC funded companies unable to get the funding they were hoping to get with interest rates up lead to a massive pullback.

Will things change next year? Maybe if some IPOs hit and the VC pump and dump pipeline gets back up and running.

dubcanada
0 replies
2h49m

Software industry is a giant bubble 90% of the time, so it's usually the first one to go. But no most industries seem to be hiring averagely to better then average at least as per the JOLTs report.

htrp
8 replies
3h6m

Severance pay: We will start with a baseline for all employees, with the average employee receiving approximately five months of severance. This will be calculated based on local notice period requirements and employee tenure.

Is this a super vague way of saying we're letting go of the senior people with tenure first. The average severance being five months implies that most people being let go probably aren't the people hired during 2020 and 21.

On a separate note, we can add bandmates to the insane titles that a company uses for their employees.

Scarblac
2 replies
2h57m

Labour laws will apply, they probably can't just pick who they lay off. Maybe they have to let go the same proportion of people at all levels of seniority.

eythian
1 replies
2h20m

Yeah, where I live (NL), it's required to be something like "group people into roles, then let people go in reverse order of seniority (i.e. LIFO) within those roles."

zucked
0 replies
57m

This is refreshingly pragmatic. I guess I shouldn't expect anything less from that part of the world.

BossingAround
1 replies
1h53m

I don't understand how you got from the quote to "senior people are let go first".

dcminter
0 replies
1h34m

I think they may have misunderstood the meaning of the word tenure (note "with tenure") and not realised it meant only duration of employment here (versus its use in US academia).

pyrophane
0 replies
1h18m

I was surprised that the "average" is 5. It makes me wonder what that distribution looks like.

chrisandchris
0 replies
2h39m

Some countries have longer notice periods. If you would work for Spotify in Switzerland, after 2 years you have 2 months notice. Given the period must starts with a new month (by law), your notice would start on 1st January. Adter 10 years its 3 months, where 5 months severance pay (as i understand it) would "only" cover at least 2 additional months.

andsoitis
0 replies
3h0m

Is this a super vague way of saying we're letting go of the senior people with tenure first. The average severance being five months implies that most people being let go probably aren't the people hired during 2020 and 21.

No, they're saying that severance is based on tenure (and local notice period requirements). On average, people laid off get 5 months worth of severance - some more, some less, based on tenure.

toboche
6 replies
8h59m

I wonder what amount of money will be saved doing these layoffs and how that compares to the overall spending of the company, given that the content streaming rights are probably a huge (the largest?) expense for the business.

ath3nd
5 replies
8h55m

It's about appearing efficient to the investors and therefore bumping the stock price and giving a payout to the few big stockholdets, rather than real efficiency. They go through a round of this routinely now, it seems, the letter is more or less the same as what he sent during last year, only percentages of laid off are different. That new version that ChatGPT generated made it more fluffy than last time.

If they were worried about efficiency, they would not have grossly over hired during covid. That's why we need unions.

1letterunixname
2 replies
7h5m

Yep. Business theater. It's about stepping on the necks of working people to suppress wages and "teach them a lesson" they probably won't learn.

matchbok
1 replies
2h48m

That's.... not how things work. (Maybe on DSA Twitter, but not in the real world lol)

ath3nd
0 replies
1h24m

This is, to an extent, exactly what is happening now, specifically to the group of people what Musk refers to as 'the laptop class'.

The high salaries and good benefits we enjoyed in the industry could only last so long. The pandemic came and it was then when the behemoths overhired and boosted their stock prices, and were happy that we managed to make them money remotely.

Now that the pandemic is over, they seized the opportunity to crack down on remote work, reduce their headcount, and one more time boost their stock price, while at the same time showing the pesky engineers who is boss. Oh, and when Twitter started with the layoffs, suddenly all of them were overstaffed, AWS, Microsoft, Spotify, you name it... The layoffs then suddenly meant a market that was hot and starving for engineers, was flooded with good and highly qualified people. And poof, went out bargaining power. The tech giants collectively benefitted from their collective actions, while we were left to compete with each other in a very difficult market.

I know that for many of the US based folks this is natural and somewhat acceptable, but things don't have to be that way, this is avoidable and preventable.

Strong unions world-wide, and good labor protection laws is the antidote to corporate greed, which, if left unchecked, will throw everything and everyone under the bus, just so they can temporarily squeeze out a point or two in their stock price before the whole world burns.

toboche
1 replies
6h6m

That's exactly why I'm wondering about the overall improvement these layoffs will make for the business as a whole. From what this blog post is saying, it could be just applying the tactics most of the industry is following at the moment, no to stay behind the others.

ath3nd
0 replies
5h36m

It's one of the many strategies to bump up their stock price.

- Harsh RTO -> people leaving, better spreadsheet at the end of fiscal quarter, BOOM, the stock is up!

- Overhire again and make sure to make a lot of fuss about hiring and growing-> ah, company is growing, BOOM the stock is up!

- End of the year incoming, layoffs again -> ah, the company is more efficient, BOOM stock the goes up again!

Managing a company that way: stock value over efficiency, also disconnects the stock value with the actual financials of the company and creates investment bubbles. The C-level and their major shareholders can also massively profit from knowing when the bubble itself is going to pop or even cause a strategic pop themselves by dumping stocks or making public announcements about specific comapny details at the right time.

They win either way, is my point, while at the end, to them people's livelihoods are just a number on a spreadsheet. The answer to that kind of management is:

- strong unions

- strong government control over business and better labor protection laws

- use financial instruments and restrictive laws to tie the stock value of a publicly traded company to its actual current financial performance and its current assets. This one won't happen for many reasons :)

mouzogu
6 replies
3h57m

"..Spotify had taken advantage of cheap borrowing during 2020 and 2021, when central bankers cut interest rates sharply in response to coronavirus pandemic lockdowns"

“Embracing this leaner structure will also allow us to invest our profits more strategically back into the business,”

invest our profits more strategically back into the business

why didn't they do this in 2020 when they got zero interest loans and free money from the government?

profits are for "strategic" investment but loans are for un-strategic and unsustainable hiring? got it.

mewpmewp2
3 replies
3h29m

I don't understand the question? They were able to use money more freely as it was more abundant, so they were able to take more risks. Now that money is more expensive, they need to be more careful about it.

ethbr1
1 replies
3h11m

I think parent might be overemphasizing strategic in that quote.

> This is not a step back; it’s a strategic reorientation. We’re still committed to investing and making bold bets, but now, with a more focused approach, ensuring Spotify’s continued profitability and ability to innovate.

"Strategic" could be replaced with "efficient". They were previously optimized for growth -- now, they're optimizing for growth:krona.

Also, it is refreshing to see a head cut announcement that doesn't bury the lede: we're firing people, and this sucks.

rchaud
0 replies
2h27m

When a company is publicly traded, mass firing announcements are no longer buried, it's red meat for shareholders.

mikrl
0 replies
3h11m

More so now that it’s their own money and not yours they’re being more careful with it.

rchaud
1 replies
2h29m

They invested the pandemic ZIRP bonanza on the 'transformative' IP that is podcasts.

In lieu of actual profitability, they also chucked in $1bn to buy up their own stock to maximize the CEO's already enormous compensation.

https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/20/spotify-to-spend-1b-buying...

bogomipz
0 replies
1h7m

Wow, it's pretty wild that an unprofitable company spent a billion dollars on share buybacks.

jamesblonde
4 replies
9h7m

You will hear more about the new term "RIF" not - reduction in force. Nobody likes to say we had layoffs, so corporate speak will be - we did a RIF ...blah blah.

It's terrible, because i love playing guitar, and they are screwing with the english language as normal people use it.

epistasis
3 replies
8h51m

There is a semantic difference in the terms:

In the past, layoffs typically came with an expectation that the employee might be rehired if more work became available or the employer’s financial condition improved. An RIF, on the hand, did not come with such an expectation; it usually meant that a certain position or an entire department was being eliminated. https://www.lawyers.com/legal-info/labor-employment-law/rif-...
jamesblonde
2 replies
8h45m

That "semantic difference" is justification for using the word, but the intent behind using RIF is the usual - water down the harshness of the thing.

I don't buy we need a new word for this. Particularly this justification is nonsense - "layoffs typically came with an expectation that the employee might be rehired if more work became available or the employer’s financial condition improved"

Who said this is true? Like say 30 years ago, IBM fired 30% of people. They didn't need to call it a RIF. Like would they re-hire the people because OS/2 took off?

sgerenser
0 replies
1h44m

I’ve only heard the term “Layoff” in regards to a temporary staff reduction in the trades/blue collar/seasonal work. In white collar jobs, layoff has pretty much always meant a permanent staff reduction.

epistasis
0 replies
16m

Language is not the same thing to all people. Having two different terms, one for permanent changes and one for more temporary changes, seems useful and beneficial to the language.

For you, the distinction in terms apparently does not exist. But for some, including me, this distinction exists. Would it not be better for us all to adopt the distinction?

jamesblonde
2 replies
8h44m

Why did this drop off the front page after a couple of mins? Loads of people seem interested. @dang ?

ryanSrich
0 replies
4h44m

The upvote to comment ratio is off (too many comments and not enough upvotes), which is a negative signal to the HN algorithm.

rapsey
0 replies
8h42m

I assume because HN keeps culture wars/political discussions down in favor of technical discussions. HN is quite heavily moderated and thank god for that.

xer
1 replies
7h51m

The elephant in the room: Will Spotify survive the coming wave of generative AI audio content? Wasn't any mentioning on that in the letter.

Seems to me like they would need to ditch a lot of silly investments like original content, platform engineering on Kubernetes and scaled agile which together carry costs in the range of $100s millions, to free up resources to battle new disruptive technologies.

dvngnt_
0 replies
3h12m

I would think so, people want to listen to swift and drake not some ML song with no relevance.

sitkack
1 replies
30m

So effectively contractors. Companies shouldn't be allowed to "shed" this much of their workforce in a system like the US's here we have a very poor safety net.

They bulked up, built their products and now want to slim down and enjoy their profits at the expense of these sacrificial workers.

mrkeen
0 replies
20m

Sidestepping the issue of the US's labour laws, I almost feel like this is what a healthy software industry should look like.

You go in, you build, and when the job is done, you leave.

We just haven't figured out how to get the job done yet.

abkolan
1 replies
2h50m

The Spotify inserted ads during the podcast makes a lot of sense now. They are really trying to make the books look good. Is this a leading indicator that the podcasts could go more towards the exclusives / originals route? For example: Like Joe Rogan.

code_runner
0 replies
41m

Spotify is actively moving away from originals (or at least changing how they do it). Inseted ads gives them better tracking and with better reporting… $$$$

ugiox
0 replies
53m

Now everyone sees just layoffs again. But there are so many companies thriving and keeping their workforce. As they are in balance. And are also happy to grow at a smaller pace.

someonehere
0 replies
2h40m

Meanwhile Apple came late to the game and now is just sitting it out. Wonder what will happen in a few years?

skywhopper
0 replies
2h48m

I suppose I appreciate that the CEO was mostly honest about the goals and what the business actually values. “Supporting work”, ie operations, maintenance, etc is considered worthless. Near term financial ROI is the only metric that is important. Investments in the long term health of the business and treating employees with respect are of no consequence.

We all know this is true, but so few layoff announcements are willing to spell it out.

That said, the thing that’s missing is accountability of the executives. They overhired and overinvested in 2020-21. Where is the accountability for their massive failure of leadership?

senda
0 replies
2h9m

weren't they paying data scientists 500k?

saos
0 replies
1h44m

That’s much

maxehmookau
0 replies
2h18m

I still cannot fathom any board allowing the CEO at the helm of a public that made cuts of 17% to remain in place.

That's a huge pivot in organisational structure by any measure and shows clearly poor judgement.

ketchupdebugger
0 replies
2h16m

I wonder if they laid off 17% of management and leadership as well. probably not, but they should

kderbyma
0 replies
2h48m

I predicted this......their API v2......that was all I needed to see you know they were firing a lot of people......they need to get profit somehow and they have no knowledge at the top....so they do what all dumb companies do....flounder until someone saves them....so cut cut cut.

jzackpete
0 replies
1h23m

I hope they fired the person who came up with "smart shuffle" and thought tying the shuffle button to a successful network call was a good idea

josefresco
0 replies
2h3m

I consider Spotify like Hulu - existing as a puppet to give "the industry" a centralized distribution service. I don't ever expect them to make a profit, unless they decide to pivot and sell what's left to another corp. Am I wrong?

honeybadger1
0 replies
1h42m

From a company that projects far too much, not surprising.

emodendroket
0 replies
1h57m

Has Spotify ever made money? It seems strange that all these music streaming services have limped along for years without having a model that makes any money or sense. Convenient for the rest of us I suppose.

charles_f
0 replies
1h32m

To understand this decision, I think it is important to assess Spotify with a clear, objective lens

... then proceeds to vague MBA word without a single number to support them.

We debated making smaller reductions throughout 2024 and 2025

What was not debated was keeping people they hired.

we still have too many people dedicated to supporting work and even doing work around the work rather than contributing to opportunities with real impact

We're left to guess what this means. What's work around the work? If that work is now unsavory, why can't they work on work rather than around it? Is this describing reducing the management layer? (support) or customer/partner support? Will they be replaced by automation? I get you don't want to go into specifics of who's let go, but then don't pretend you're providing a clear analysis, and don't give a washed out business lingo salad instead.

TBH I don't see what changed on Spotify for a customer perspective in the past few years. I still see bugs I reported years ago, the UI is largely the same. Not that I'm complaining, I just care about the music. But that leads me to think either the dev team is producing stuff that's on the fringe and optional, being quite inefficient, or mainly working on maintenance, and the bulk of the opex is going elsewhere.

ardit33
0 replies
9h19m

Sad to see this happening to my former co-workers. At least it looks like the severance seems to be generous.

"We will start with a baseline for all employees, with the average employee receiving approximately five months of severance."

Solvency
0 replies
1h42m

Spotify spends millions per month on lavish "creative" team salaries in NYC who do nothing but create gradient playlist covers and other low grade "design" work that is 100% unnecessary. All while they redesign and destroy their UX and product experiences every iteration. All of that money could go straight to the artists.