• @CAVOK@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    If the workers of Spotify had been unionized then the CEO Daniel Ek wouldn’t have been able to fire 1500 people by sending them an email.

    • @SCB@lemmy.world
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      11 year ago

      Maybe they could try not paying a fascist $200 million for his podcast. That would save some money right there.

      Only if his podcast has fewer subscribers than generate $200M revenue

    • @dangblingus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      91 year ago

      As much as I dislike Rogan, he’s hardly a fascist. He’s just an idiot that agrees with anyone speaking confidently for more than 5 seconds.

      • @unexpectedteapot@lemmy.ml
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        21 year ago

        an idiot that agrees with anyone speaking confidently for more than 5 seconds.

        Isn’t that the bread and butter of Fascists? It is pretty much the hallmark of a Fascist movement to have a “confident speaker” to wow the masses.

  • @Blackmist@feddit.uk
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    281 year ago

    Yes, fire everybody. That’s surely a fantastic long term plan to make that all-important line go up.

  • @lightnsfw@reddthat.com
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    191 year ago

    Hopefully this includes the guy that changed it so there’s always some Taylor Swift song instead of what I was actually listening to last when I open the app.

      • @lightnsfw@reddthat.com
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        21 year ago

        I use a complex password. I don’t see a way to view logged in devices but nothing else is fishy so I’m assuming it’s something some marketing idiot came up with.

    • @fosforus@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      They also bought Michelle Obama and Duke&Duchess of Essex as podcasters. Not saying these are equivalent to Rogan, just that they seem to be burning money on things that has nothing to do with music. And I’m very much not a fan of fucking up podcasts as a simple medium delivered by RSS. I have a futile hope that that decision will burn them.

      • Riskable
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        301 year ago

        They’re investing heavily in podcasts because podcasts are far, far more profitable than music. If they can get people used to (and hooked) on listening to podcasts (any podcasts) through Spotify then all that money spent on popular podcasters will be worth it (in the end).

        I’m sure Spotify would love it if they could stop streaming music entirely and just focus on podcasts. Streaming music costs them a ton of money and overhead (bureaucracy associated with keeping track of and paying artists globally with bazillions of laws and regulations and fees to navigate) whereas podcasts just cost bandwidth.

        • @slaacaa@lemmy.world
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          101 year ago

          I hate that you’re right. I listen to 0 podcast, it’s just not my format, yet they constantly push it in my face

      • @EnderMB@lemmy.world
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        41 year ago

        Big tech used to be built on the idea that you could work on a moonshot idea, have it fail, and then be reassigned to something new, or swallowed into new orgs. This way, you could work on the next Zune, Fire Phone, or Circles, and not fear for your job - like you would if you worked for a startup.

        Now, they don’t give a fuck. If the moonshot fails, they move the exec to a new org, and fire the entire team. It means that companies like Spotify can diversify their offering while saving money, and due to the poor hiring market and general apathy of tech workers, they just deal with it.

      • @villainy@lemmy.world
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        171 year ago

        And I’m very much not a fan of fucking up podcasts as a simple medium delivered by RSS. I have a futile hope that that decision will burn them.

        This was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me. When they started locking up shows to their app, I cancelled my subscription and dropped Spotify entirely. I don’t even listen to any of the shows they bought but I do listen to a lot of podcasts through Pocket Casts and take umbrage when anybody fucks with the standards.

    • Blackout
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      571 year ago

      I think Joe was out of things to say 10 years ago. You could replace him with AI and never know the difference.

        • Riskable
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          91 year ago

          You’re overestimating the intelligence and ability of his listeners if you think they’d notice the difference.

      • @theneverfox@pawb.social
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        51 year ago

        The opposite. He never had anything to say, he was just a great interviewer.

        The problem is he started believing he had something to say, and started talking over guests he disagrees with… The last one I watched the guest spoke for less than 2 minutes before Joe went on a 5+ minute rant about how he didn’t believe it. I can’t even remember what it was about, because the guy didn’t even get to lay out his argument

        We got it Joe, you think the world is a magical place and have strong opinions on how humans should interact. Let the science man talk

            • @LemmyIsFantastic@lemmy.world
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              -31 year ago

              They could easily pay those workers by terminating the contract with Rogan

              No. Rogan brings in subs. He sells ads. He is the most popular podcast on the planet. He makes them money, Spotify isn’t a Joe Rogan charity.

          • @TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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            221 year ago

            He has done a lot to help spread things like anti-vaxxer lies. He’s given platform to shitty right wingers and treated their ideas as reasonable alternatives to more mainstream views. He generally has presented his views as moderate and he’s “just asking questions” which seems disingenuous.

            He generally comes off as an idiot who likes money, but being responsible about what he allows on his show is not a big concern as long as the dollars keep flowing

  • /home/pineapplelover
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    21 year ago

    Despite being a shit company, them and apple music, maybe youtube music are the only top alternatives. Yes I can easily pirate and have downloaded spotify music using Spotdl but I also listen to podcasts on there and I don’t want it to clutter up my newpipe or libretube feed.

    • OtterOP
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      21 year ago

      Yea I’ll probably keep using them, and advocate for better pay / pay artists another way

      This is what people mean where piracy is a service problem. It’s much more convenient to have nearly ALL the music available on each of the platforms.

      I wonder if that’s the biggest reason people pirate movies and TV, but pay for music and games. Not having to juggle where all the content is

  • AzureDiamond
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    851 year ago

    Anyone knows why Spotify needed 9000 employees in the first place?

    • @EnderMB@lemmy.world
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      31 year ago

      It doesn’t surprise me all that much, as someone that works for a big tech company.

      A small number of that will be IC’s and managers that keep the services going, alongside people that create FOH stuff. Alongside that, they’ll likely have a lot of people in data storage, data science, perhaps even research science. Put these across multiple continents and timezones, and you’ve likely got a few thousand.

      The majority after this are likely upper management, sales and account staff (you’d be shocked at how many of these exist in media tech), and internal teams. Again, put these around the world, maybe even more so, as some account staff will work with people in local markets, so you’ll have people in dozens of countries.

      Operationally, they need nowhere near this amount, but if you want to achieve “growth” you need all the supporting stuff.

    • Probably devs, updates, the verification and review process for music, reports. Apparently they also create playlists by hand.

      The annoying ads also won’t create themselves. There’s a lot of effort being put into making them as annoying as possible actually.

      • BruceTwarzen
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        481 year ago

        Wow, i really need to stop using spotify. 9000 people somehow created the worst algorithm possible. I have 800 songs in my playlist and their “randomiser” is the worst thing i have ever seen. I accidentally added one stand up track and all their enhanced randomiser adds are comedy tracks. And not even new ones, it’s always the same ones. The app is dumb as hell. Click a odcast accidentally and never get rid of it from the home screen ever again. Instead of paying their artists or apparently workers, they aquire shit like joe rogan.

        • @SinningStromgald@lemmy.world
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          191 year ago

          Yeah, their smart random, or whatever they call it, is horrible. Thank God clicking it again removes the garbage it added to a playlist.

          • @noodlejetski@lemm.ee
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            51 year ago

            it’s been draining battery like crazy for me recently. I’d listen to music for an hour in the morning, and in the afternoon it’d show up as the first or second position on battery stats with “10 hours in background”. it would also take its sweet time to load a playlist that I’ve downloaded for offline use when I was in a poor reception area, I assume because of the playlist “enhancing” or “smart shuffle”, even though I’ve had those disabled. I’ve decided to temporarily move over to Deezer until I use my subscription to rip my music library, and then go back to using a local music library as the lawd intended us to do.

            • @Nudding@lemmy.world
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              01 year ago

              Only reason I ever used it was because my ex had it at the time, after we broke up, I said good riddance.

      • @azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
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        -31 year ago

        Each of those should be a team, not a 1k+ person department. A few tens of engineers for dev, the same for QA and DevOps, then maybe a few hundred employees for all the review processes, marketing, relationships with music labels&advertisers, etc.

        Discord famously runs (ran) with 50-odd engineers. Silicon Valley’s VC-backed economy is famously terrible with over-highering by orders of magnitude, and since interest rates went up some of those companies realized that maybe they should stop burning so much money.

        • BraveSirZaphod
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          71 year ago

          You have to keep in mind that they operate all over the world. Each country has its own labels and messy negotiations to do. Doing literally anything on a global scale takes a lot of people, no matter what it is, just to navigate the differing business environments.

          • @BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            So we should expect their legalese and marketing departments to be the heaviest staffed then, right?

            Mind, I’m not disagreeing with you, you make a very good point. Licensing is arcanely complex, and it’s different for every country. Also makes sense to me that legal and marketing would be significantly impacted by all this.

            Almost like you’d need a top level org for both legal and marketing (2 orgs) then sub organizations for each country/legal domain.

            Seems like that could require quite a few people.

            Edit: holy non-words, autoincorrect.

            • @azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
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              11 year ago

              That’s my point. But not “9000 people” many people. That’s an ABSURD number, that’s almost certainly more people than there are record labels with nonstandard/custom contracts with spotify…

    • @BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world
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      101 year ago

      Trying to come up with rough IT numbers and I don’t think I could break 500 (depends on how much they self-host and not considering contractors). Even if I bump it up to 4500 it seems insane for a large “digital distribution” company to have 50% of its workforce to be non-IT.

      • @yaaaaayPancakes@lemmy.world
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        101 year ago

        My buddy works there now, as the audiobook company he worked for got acquired by them.

        You would be shocked how stupid and manual the content acquisition process is. Book publishers might as well still be operating back in the 90s, it’s all phone calls and spreadsheets attached to the emails and manual FTP uploads.

        If the music business is anything like the audiobook business they likely need so many non IT just to keep the machine fed with content.

      • AzureDiamond
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        31 year ago

        That is what I was thinking, too. Maybe it’s really just marketing, hand curated content like someone commented or something else non technical.

        I saw banks being maintained by 10-20 people.

  • @Copernican@lemmy.world
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    51 year ago

    I’ve been in tech for a while, I can’t tell how much of this is due to over hiring and over paying for work during that crazy time 2 years ago. I had lots of friends bounce to hire paying jobs and a lot of folks were just trying to gobble up talent. A lot of those places doing that seemed to be having big lay offs in the years following. I think there was a lot of optimism back the about the market, and it seems like course correction and pessimistic outlooks at play.

    • @Jessvj93@lemmy.world
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      21 year ago

      On top of that, moneys tight right now. Saw 3 months of spotify premium dangled for 10 bucks like a week or two ago and it just seemed desperate to me. Still haven’t come back tho, broke, and I feel for these employees.

  • @ozmot@lemmy.world
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    231 year ago

    Because of interest rates hikes, companies like Spotify have to focuses on more trivial matters like being profitable. 17% lay off seems like a lot. I wonder if they will go bankrupt?

    • @fosforus@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      They reported a 65m profit on the quarter before these layoffs. I don’t think they’re going bankrupt unless this last quarter has been a disaster for them.

    • BraveSirZaphod
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      151 year ago

      Spotify’s issue isn’t unique. Fundamentally, given how much money the labels demand and how relatively low streaming subscription fees are, there’s simply not a ton of money around. Spotify has been unprofitable for most of the past few years. The fact of the matter is that people expect to be able to listen to essentially all music for a relatively cheap price, and labels expect to get most of that money. The specifics of the company don’t matter much. If Spotify dies, people will migrate to another platform, and the finances won’t be meaningfully different there. Maybe someone like Apple could afford to eat the losses or is actually big enough to tell the labels to pound sand, but otherwise, this is just kinda what the situation is.

      • Dr. Moose
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        11 year ago

        I think it’s more related to rising interest rates which hasn’t happened for decades now. I don’t Spotify is in any real trouble tbh, it’s just house cleaning and future planning given the business landscape changes.

        • BraveSirZaphod
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          01 year ago

          I agree that’s probably their main issue right now, and they’re hardly unique there. You’ve seen layoffs and belt tightening everywhere as the free money faucets have dried up.

          That said, I think the core business model isn’t exactly challenging. Similarly to Netflix ten years ago, they’re primarily serving content that they don’t own, but unlike Netflix, they’re probably not going to be able to pivot into content creation unless they want to actually become a proper label, and even then, they’d need big enough stars that other distribution platforms can’t afford to not cooperate with them. Otherwise, they’re always going to be at the mercy of the labels, though there is some balance, since the labels also need the streaming platforms to at least survive.

  • AutoTL;DRB
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    41 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Swedish music-streaming giant Spotify has announced it is cutting 17% of its workforce, about 1,500 jobs, as the company seeks to clamp down on costs.

    Spotify employs about 9,000 people, and Mr Ek said “substantial action to rightsize our costs” was needed for the company to meet its objectives.

    Mr Ek said that given the recent “positive” results, the job cuts being announced “will feel surprisingly large” for many people.

    He said Spotify had considered making smaller reductions during 2024 and 2025, but decided that more drastic action was needed to improve the company’s finances.

    Since it launched, Spotify has spent a lot of money on growing the business, and in securing exclusive content such as podcasts created by the likes of Michelle and Barack Obama as well as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

    Commenting on podcast content, Mr Ek told the BBC in September: “The truth of the matter is some of it has worked, some of it hasn’t.”


    The original article contains 302 words, the summary contains 161 words. Saved 47%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!