I find it hard to feel sorry for a company that has somehow found a legal-ish business model based on screwing artists. Their demise cannot come fast enough.
Yes, but it means problem is somewhere else than Spotify. Especially considering that with Spotify more revenue goes to right holders compared to CD sales.
> Moreover, notes Werde, within the pie chart detailing the total revenue that Spotify generates through music streaming, “roughly 70% of it is going to rights holders,” he says. The actual recording artists? “They’re keeping anywhere between 5% and a quarter.”
The impact on actual album sales likely hits hard, too; I recall an artist on NPR talking about how one CD sale nets them more into their actual pocket than a hundred thousand streams.
> So none of [the royalty system] makes sense... if a song is played on the radio, 100% of the royalties go to the songwriter. But if the same song is played on a streaming service, only about 20% of the royalties go to the songwriter. Where does that come from?"
Radio uses public airwaves, and is largely an exception to how the music business works. Not even recording artists get revenue from radio plays, only the songwriters (aka copyright holders).
After all this time if Spotify could have found a way to cut off the middlemen, they would have happily done it. From your own quote, you should be mad at Universal & co, not Spotify.
> From your own quote, you should be mad at Universal & co, not Spotify.
The point is that "helped to almost double music industry revenue" from upthread doesn't actually help the folks I want helped; it's a misleading stat.
Not to excuse the consolidated, monopolistic recording industry, but isn't there some point at which artists are responsible for not signing away their masters?
If you're a newer artist just starting out, you most likely aren't going to get signed with any big name label if you refuse to sign away your masters. The masters are how the label can make money off of you for probably a hundred years, even if you leave them. They gotta make their money back somehow.
You may be able to do it with a smaller label that is very friendly to artists, but you most likely aren't going to be able to access the most in-demand producers, have a label pay for all of your bills/food/rent/etc while you focus on the album.
Seems like a newer artist could use the power of the internet and YouTube and directly go to Spotify to negotiate. There is near zero cost to reach a global audience.
But if they want to procure the services of the publishers, then they have to agree to the terms.
The power of the internet and YouTube is a lot more manufactured than you may think. See the recent ACBDEFU origin drama (artist posts about trying to come up with a song, Marketing Manager from her record label just so happens to comment the idea on her video, song sees strong commercial success just a week later).
It's totally possible an artist makes a break on the internet. Sarah Crean blew up from 200 monthly listeners to almost 200,000 overnight because a music TikToker posted about how great her songs are as an independent artist. (TBH it is, go check it out)
Being independent is totally a way you can go, but if you'd want to make money in the industry to really live off of you have 2 options:
- Work a job (or 2) for hours a day to keep yourself fed/housed while also doing the job of 5-10 people to try to get your music noticed enough to make money directly from fans.
- Sign up with a label, immediately get your daily life taken care of and focus on your music full time.
Sadly, for a lot of artists, the promise of being able to quit your job and focus on your passion full time is an offer too lucrative to turn down. It's an exploitative industry, but when it works it works. And when it fails, it's the artist that's left on the side of the highway. Labels are like casinos, the house never loses.
Spotify is not responsible for the terrible contracts linking artists to right holders. If artists want a fairer revenue split, they should just negotiate it with the distribution companies they chose to sign with.
Your citation is self-contradictory - if artist is also rights holder (which is not that rare I think) they will receive more than quarter.
70% percent of Spotify revenue goes to the right holders vs ~40% of a CD sale. That artist must have signed really bad deal, or he/she is selling CDs themself which makes comparison really misleading.
As far as I am aware it is pretty rare for an artist to also be the rights holder. Typically "signing with a major record label" involves signing over the rights. Who then hold on to them or resell them. For example, Michael Jackson owned the rights to The Beatles so that 70% went to him\his estate not members of the band.
The Taylor Swift episode on the Acquired podcast actually does a fantastic job of explaining how this works and why artists barely make money on streaming services - as opposed to radio broadcasts for example.
And that's an issue with the music industry being disproportionately represented by 3 major labels wielding most of the power against the artists, not on distributors.
I'm not arguing that Spotify is screwing artists. I don't know. However, I would just point out that revenue growth in and of itself does not necessarily mean that they are improving the lot of artists. They could 10x revenue, but if profits are being cut in half, as just an example, then this isn't improving artists' business.
Blame music labels, Spotify tried to propose other models of payment to artists, always blocked by labels with the threat of removing their catalogues in case that goes through.
As in any passion-driven industry: artists/creative gets shafted and exploited by middlemen (music labels, game studios/publishers, movie studios, etc.) solely because there's a never-ending stream of passionate individuals that will be exploited to have their creations out in the world.
After Napster fired a warning shot across the bow of the music industry, it was Apple that came to collect [1]. Paying just $0.69 or $0.99 for songs without having to buy a full album represented a tectonic shift.
But who needs to buy a song? Spotify (and Pandora, Grooveshark, etc.) brought the same streaming feature from YouTube and Netflix to music. That was even more consumer friendly.
I'm surprised this is making news. At such a number it feels almost like a typical/seasonal adjustment you see from big tech already. Probably the only reason this is being reported and on HN is due to the existing environment :-)
That said, their podcasting play has been poorly executed and I imagine they are losing plenty here with no real profit solution in sight.
What exactly was their podcast strategy? Was their plan to buy up a bunch of podcasts and podcast production studios and then eventually pull the plug on publishing those podcasts anywhere else, thereby making them exclusive to Spotify? If so, were they unable to do that? Did they try (I mean making some big podcasts exclusive)?
They tried that with Rogan and it didn't go well. Ironically, I don't think the problem was their plan, I think it was that the people that work at Spotify hate people like Rogan and don't want to see him do well. A few execs obviously believe in his content, but the vast majority of Spotify employees I've talked to see him as a dangerous anti-vax transphobe.
so what? companies run on command and control, as much as they try to soften that image. how did the employees hating the product affect their work? I agree work can be better with passionate and invested workers doing it, but workers disinterest or disdain for the product of their work is the norm when they have essentially no ownership over it. they're not a bunch of children who will spin the hamster wheel faster for their boss when it's hillary clinton on their work
by essentially no ownership what I mean is that the amount of ownership granted to workers via equity is negotiated as part of overall compensation in wage labor market (market means it's as low as each company can competitively get away with, so just saying the share exists does not mean it's of the same class), the majority ownership is elsewhere and there are a lot of non-workers who need to get rich off their work. commenting that ESOPs give workers and their owners the same sense of stakeholder ownership is as interesting as saying america has a universally flat ownership class structure because everyone can buy a share on the market
Anecdoctical, but Rogan seems way less relevant now he's locked in the Spotify walled garden. It could well be that it's just him running out of steam; the whole galaxy he's effectively part of, has significantly fallen in popularity since the Capitol riot.
IMO probably more related to pandemic wind down than the Jan 6 stuff. His podcast has always been pretty eclectic and has siloed audiences based on the topics.
During the pandemic he had a lot of notoriety and relevance because he would platform opinion contrary to the establishment governmental health authorities. To a large degree because of the mis/disinformation guidelines on social media sites, his podcast was the only place a lot of that information could be found and his show gained popularity with a new silo of listeners. He achieved a lot of relevance from that group…and the media because of it, which was hellbent on attempting to “correct” his allegedly dangerous opinions.
They made a bunch of Gimlet Media podcasts exclusive to Spotify soon after they bought them, it was irritating at the time but for me at least it was pretty easy to just find some other podcasts to replace them with.
And I suppose more famously they did make Joe Rogan exclusive to Spotify as well, and he's probably the biggest name in podcasting
That was the idea, I think the only real success they have had with an exclusive was the Joe Rogan Experience, I know they have ads on his show but I haven't seen that rolled out to other podcasts.
Don't forget also forcefully add Podcasts to the UI and not allow hiding them. Also some irritating prompts in the initial rollout that kept begging you to try podcasts.
I basically unsubscribed and switched to YT Music because of that.
It's one thing for a company to offer a new service, it's another to try and push shit on consumers that aren't interested.
I hate the meetings where marketing and product spend 30 minutes talking themselves into that kind of pushy behavior on the grounds “our customers will want to be informed.” Or our CMO who likes to say “our paying customers like being marketed to”’with total sincerity.
Pre-pandemic, you never heard of tech companies doing across-the-board layoffs unless things were going quite poorly. There might have been staff reductions, but they would be targeted: a company axes an entire division, e.g.
Now it seems like since the FAANGs are doing it everyone else is jumping on board. Tech layoffs have become trendy. That's a pretty surprising outcome.
I work in an industry that has layoffs every few years. I'm contract, and its been great. Each job loss has been a pay increase and me doing even more technical work.
The people who were employees and didn't get laid off, they worked extra hours.
If you are flexible, layoffs are probably good for the economic reorganization. If you aren't flexible, this is probably an incredibly stressful time.
I agree, being in the first round of layoffs is the best option if you play your cards right. You typically get the most generous severance terms, have more opportunities than someone who is the last to be laid off in a bad economy and often get a salary adjustment after your long vacation.
The worst is being the team that shuts the lights off behind them, you can expect high expectations paired with salary cuts and getting dumped into the labor pool at the bottom of the market. If things magically do go well those rewards flow to the investors.
So far I've only been in the 2nd group and it sucks.
The environment has changed, we're not in ZIRP anymore. I just saw a LinkedIn post celebrating that their company went from 11 to 100 UI/UX designers in 6 years (at a bank of all places). I'm pretty sure what's about to happen to them, but it's indicative of the whole industry. Companies have over hired in pretty much every department because there was money and there was nobody there difficult hard questions.
This comment should just be auto-posted every time there is any mention of employee count on HN. Will save all of us the trouble of beating this horse every time.
And every time someone does it, and it's a globe-spanning platform, someone should respond quickly by saying well at least some of these people have to deal with 75+ different languages and some of these people have to deal with relationships with 100+ different governments and taxing authorities.
And business relations in each of the markets. Marketing as well, editorial content, so on and so forth.
I feel sometimes that a lot of the HN folks work on small-scale companies, releasing MVPs and don't have much of an idea about the operations side of a larger operation. It's easy to think in MVP terms, it's really, really hard to understand the nuances (and costs) that scaling that to hundreds of millions of users across dozens to hundred+ countries entail.
I think its the WhatsApp effect, they had all of 55 employees[0] and were bought for 19 Billion USD (cash & stock but still). Never mind that the product that is WhatsApp is fairly unique in how it can be engineered
Yeah and also the simple literal fact that WhatsApp in fact ended up with tens of thousands of employees.
Those who find the last sentence counterintuitive should stop to note that if you use WhatsApp today you're interacting with a company with tens of thousands of employees.
As a product or a company? Pretty sure the combined entity that now includes WhatsApp is drastically more successful from a financial standpoint that the predecessor standalone company that comprised WhatsApp and had 55 employees.
Some of us work/worked for organizations doing hardware, marketing, sales to every corner of the planet and dealing with supply chain with 1/8 of that workforce though (more than 2 decades ago - productivity should be better now).
Spinning this as anything more than gross overhiring that is going to correct either in dribs and drabs or spectacularly sounds like complete bullshit to those that had been around a few bust cycles and worked in other industries.
It all ends in speculation anyway, different industries have different sets of requirements, and regulatory frameworks. Different products at scale have different needs for maintenance and development. I know some people working with hardware with sales spanning most of the globe in a company with 300 employees, it doesn't mean you can have a phone manufacturer selling to most of the globe with just 300 employees.
Of course there's some level of overhiring but whatever comment here saying that 1/10, or 1/2, or whatever other percentage is what is needed is baseless speculation on some non-informed guess. Without knowing the insides it's just baseless speculation, and even in the inside you'd need to be in a higher level of management to have a decent overview of what's waste (and why it's waste) vs what's actually needed.
Just thinking about dealing with payment processing, regulatory environment of music licensing, customer support, and record labels around all countries on which they operate makes my head hurt a little.
But then again, your bad take is the reason I keep coming back to HN. I always find it amusing how people here always seem to have all the answers for things they never worked with. Most of the times I think people being butthurt for whatever reason.
"Can't find the solution you're looking for? Here's how to get help from our experts. Note: We currently don't offer support by phone."
And half of what they do have is outsourced to "community members".
> regulatory environment of music licensing
This, this is what they do. So that's something. Is it 9600 people something? Apparently not since they already shaved off 6% of the work force earlier this year. It would seem their own CEO appears to agree with the take they are overweight.
Selling hardware around the world has tremendous regulatory burden as well. If you can't imagine the complexities of designing, sourcing and selling hardware products around the world maybe think harder?
Let the chips fall where they may. It isn't like it's the first or even biggest layoff for Spotify this year.
Prediction: this will become a thread where lots of people will confidently handwave about how Spotify does "so much stuff" that "obviously" they need 8000 people, please jump on this bandwagon, but not provide any actual rigor that would justify why 8k is reasonable, 16k is too much, and 4k too little (nor realize that they should be sanity checking the argument that way).
I don't have any hard info, but here's my speculation:
The Spotify most people know (finding and playing songs, creating playlists, recommendations), which obviously very important, is probably a tiny fraction of the complexity for the company.
I would wager the vast majority of the employees at Spotify are working on everything else needed to enable the above. The artists portal, analytics and royalties, paying the labels, paying the artists, legal for every country, etc.
Someone who knows could probably elaborate more than me on everything needed to run a company like that.
Does that require 8000 people? Debatable, but it's certainly more complex than clicking a song and playing it.
EDIT: A quick glimpse at job listing for Spotify on LinkedIn shows:
Include in that list: ingesting content (audio and video), maintaining clients for <N> platforms, strategic partners support. Algorithmical personalisation is also quite important for Spotify's offering, etc.
Well you are right - Spotify operates in 184 markets, so even if you only had a small 10 person team for each country handling sales/marketing/support/localisation, that's already c2000 employees before you start on anything else.
Remember Spotify has approx. the same number of premium subscribers as Netflix has subscribers, so it's not exactly tiny.
Monaco, Syria, North Korea, Lithuania don't need 10 person teams. It's this napkin math that causes tech companies to inflate. I'm sure Spotify execs did the same math and told HR "Hire 10 people per country, thx".
In the Age of AI, even before 2023 and ChatGPT, localization is a very automatable+contractor heavy job that is very easy to complete. All of africa might need 3-4 teams of 20 people total, and that's including sales/marketing. Maybe double for South America.
The reason tech companies have expanded so much is it looks better when an 8000 employee company controls the worlds music than when an 800 person company does. Same with Google, Facebook, AirBnB, Netflix, etc. The tech monopolies want to make they monopolies seem less ridiculous to regulators.
Over-hiring is probably the same everywhere. When "times are good", everyone in the organisation wants to hire because their number of subordinates makes them seem more important and accomplished.
80 people to manage African countries from a finance, sales, marketing, support, legal, localisation and licensing perspective for a company the scale of Spotify is way too light.
Localisation isn’t just about language - consider payment requirements, legal and regulatory specific challenges, pricing strategy, regional licensing, there might be specific features required to support low bandwidth (eg carrier agreements), if you want to ad-support like Spotify you will need a team to sell ads… it’s hardly a chatgpt + few contractors job.
Spotify makes money from record labels who pay good sums for a placement on various ”hot new metal”-lists. Managing those deals takes lots of personnel
With 1-2k people you can probably barely keep the current business from falling apart. Like crewing an ship and constantly bailing out water, but never plugging leaks.
With a few k more you might plug leaks, and do actual maintenance of the ship. While you’re not always firefighting, you're also mostly just doing basic maintenance to ensure people don’t always work at 3am bailing out the ship to barely keep it afloat. No actual new fancy features being added to your ship.
If you want to actually build NEW features on your speedboat, you need even more people. And if you care about features, and not burning out employees, that’s how you get to 8k.
The same as in any big company: going through hordes of small/medium/large initiatives being pushed around by multiple orgs inside the larger org to achieve a goal set by the C-level.
Seriously, what do you expect the answer to be? Have you worked in any large org with thousands of employees? They are all pretty similar, there's tech debt, there's new initiatives, there is maintenance to be done. You need to work in one to understand how the whole machine works, there's no simple answer to be given on HN about what they are all up to, it's a mix of all of the above as it'd be in any large org...
- N people to just juggle live incidents/emergencies. Actually triage, live, why the Desantis campaign launch on Twitter isn't working. Give the server more RAM, spin up more instances, pray it works.
- M+N people to do the work to prevent the incidents/emergencies (maintenance). Actually ensure the next big giant event on the streaming service doesn't cause failures. Create automatic scaling up of new capacity as needed. But avoid overprovisioning and costing the company a bazillion $$. Get to the bottom of what triggered the incident. Build practices, runbooks, etc the next time this happens.
- M+N+L people to actually create new stuff. Create a new feature on the live streaming service to comment or somesuch. (and all the work M+N people do to handle incidents with this new feature)
So X * (M+N+L) people if every product area is trying to create new stuff.
But the reality is most teams have T people where M < T < (M+N+L). Which is very company dependent.
Spotify has dozens of consumer facing product areas. Probably many more for creators, record labels, admins, etc etc
I've had the theory that Spotify is a legal department that happens to own a tech company. That would explain why its app is so terrible. And from what I've seen, music licensing is very very hard to do correctly, especially internationally and with so many different labels.
Can you explain what makes it terrible? I only use Vanilla Music (open-source) for my mp3 collection, and Spotify for streaming. I don't think I've ever tried any other commercial apps. The Spotify app seems fine to me. My only issue is that the volume in ads is higher than the volume of the music. I wish Google would forbid this in their appstore terms.
There are thousands of small UI problems and bugs. To me, the biggest joke/travesty is their "algorithm" which literally builds a top20 radio station echo chamber around you the moment you dare casually play a song. Then you're imprisoned rapidly by your own choices. The autoplay decision-making is atrocious. You are guaranteed to hear a song you just played manually within 10 songs. It's so painfully dumb. You could write a better system using a random number generator.
To me, the biggest joke/travesty is their "algorithm" which literally builds a top20 radio station echo chamber around you the moment you dare casually play a song
This is literally by design. Amazon doesn't want you to search, they want you to buy what they suggest on the homepage. Spotify doesn't want you listening to what you want, they want to shove profitable songs down your throat. you know how radio in america is controlled by the labels? Same with spotify.
It's like the tyranny of the rocket equation, but for companies.
To do more (ex open in different markets) you need more people, but with more people you need more support people, which also need to be supported in turn ...
Next thing you know you have 5 engineers on Chaos Monkey so that your 20 SREs can more easily test their globally distributed low-latency CDN. You also have region lawyer manager VPs who manage lawyer teams per country, and are in turn managed by your glonal Head of Lawyering. Who also has an administrative assistant otherwise theyd lose head over the schedule and their tasks...
And we didn't even get to the programmers yet.
In rockets, to go a bit faster or haul a bit more mass, you need a lot more fuel.
Orgs are the same. Except they don't explode. Usually.
Spotify has an in-house design team in NYC of well over 25 highly paid art directors (think $150k and up), poached from the digital ad agency, who do absolutely nothing all day besides work on "campaign ideas" and make playlist covers and "design systems for RapCaviar" and generate portfolio-friendly PDFs of work that have absolutely zero connection to the core product or product experience. Meanwhile their actual branding and website (etc) are all designed by external highly paid agencies. The internal design team get to enjoy really exclusive private concerts in the NY HQ by music artists beholden to Spotify. It's all very cushy.
The company is absolutely heavy with highly paid department staff who are all working on fantasyware that does nothing to improve all of the things people complain about Spotify.
I mean, it's a music streaming platform with global presence (and to my experience, with no downtime), dealing with the regulatory environment, record labels, payment processing, and taxation across all different jurisdictions. Also needs to have customer service support in all languages it operates.
If you ask me, 8k doesn't sound absurd at all. Maybe a bit on the high end of what I would have guessed, but I'm possibly not accounting for new things they might be developing as well.
Remove and/or break existing features, mostly. To their credit, they do occasionally introduce highly annoying anti-features with no way to work around them.
Excellent. Maybe they can stop fucking up the UI now. Although the bug that perforates my eardrums when I switch from my laptop to iPhone will probably never get fixed.
Seriously. While I understand that there's a human side to this whole thing, I can't help but hope that whoever was in charge of the recent desktop UI mangling was part of this 2%
The UI mangler is probably a “high performer” who is great at slideware engineering. This is their second round of layoffs and I would suggest not kicking the folks who are down today.
Given they backslid on the feed given how badly it went down, and given they had sold the feed to artists (literally, giving them better promotion in exchange for lower royalties was defacto selling advertising space on the screens of "ad free users) which they will now have to unpick probably at a material effect on cost projections, I suspect the product management team are probably not considered high performers at present.
The podcasting initiative was doomed to fail as soon as Apple started allowing individual podcasts to monetize directly. That prevented them from rolling up the long tail of the podcast universe as a Spotify exclusive by just paying for the biggest shows. It was a good strategy by Apple. Then you combine the change in the macro environment, and that was the final nail in the coffin.
>The podcasting initiative was doomed to fail as soon as Apple started allowing individual podcasts to monetize directly.
Eh, as someone who never listened to the big guys or use Apple's podcasts, I'd hardly give Apple credit. It was just impossible to put podcasts behind a paywall after they were free for a decade.
It truly seems like a stupid thing. Reminds me of how one of the satellite radio companies would buy a popular radio host, and that popular radio host would lose their popularity in exchange for millions.
It could have worked, but only if Apple remained asleep. Paying for big shows like Joe Rogan has given Spotify a large market share in podcasts. Obviously they weren't going to offer upfronts to every single podcast. Their strategy was to bring users in with the biggest shows, and have the rest of the podcasts feel like they have no choice but to move to Spotify to monetize (via their ad-tech).
Before Spotify, "podcasting" meant "open medium based on web standards". Spotify embraced/extended/extinguished it to the point that even technical people happily call shows distributed on closed platforms like Spotify and YouTube "podcasts".
Since freeing the word "podcasting" from its open, standards-based chains, Spotify now claims to be the largest podcast listening platform with 25% of U.S. listeners. As a closed platform, there's no way to independently verify whether Spotify is cooking their metrics books.
This is an academic argument for a purist. The fact is that Apple checkmated them by allowing monetization of podcasts directly. Without being effectively countered, Spotify wouldn't just be 25% of the market, they'd be the YouTube of podcasting.
I feel like you are overestmating the impact of Apple Podcast subscriptions. It doesn't seem like a very well supported feature outside of a few large media brands.
While this may be tough on the 200 employees who have been let go, (selfishly) I hope one of them isn't the guy who maintains the Linux desktop client. :S
It was always a labo(u)r of love, and never seemed to have widespread support, due to the tiny userbase.
98% of the time I prefer YouTube (With AdBlock on of course). YouTube in most cases has the actual music videos, and a lot more adventurous (video) content because they can host remixes, which are so much more entertaining than just a bunch of album covers. Spotify also does nothing to promote and pay independent artists, they actually charge most independent musicians (even the ones not making profit) to be displayed on their platform rather than paying royalties, which is a pretty much giant ponzi scheme. YouTube does not pay greatly either in most cases, but it will occasionally promote artists better, and it allows content to be shared on other sites far beyond Spotify's controlling and restrictive attitude towards music content (they don't even really own nor make) hosted on their platform.
Spotify's UI is wonky and lacks visual appeal at most times for me. Having to frequently go back to the app to control or change what is playing is quite annoying, it really only needs to be a small scale floating window, as music player tech really hasn't changed dramatically since winamp. Spotify is not a revolutionary company at all, even Soundcloud (still not great to independent musicians either) has had a more visually appealing layout that values artists and the music content more than Spotify, and they've been that way for decades now.
> Spotify also does nothing to promote and pay independent artists, they actually charge most independent musicians (even the ones not making profit) to be displayed on their platform rather than paying royalties, which is a pretty much giant ponzi scheme.
I actually thought they supported it officially. Seems like it's made by their engineers in their spare time though:
"Spotify for Linux is a labor of love from our engineers that wanted to listen to Spotify on their Linux development machines. They work on it in their spare time and it is currently not a platform that we actively support." [1]
Can I ask why? Last time I used it, I didn't see any difference compared to the web version. Modern browsers can be controlled through MPRIS (playerctl or the bult-in client if you're using a full DE) and don't waste an additional couple of gigabytes of RAM to play a single audio stream.
I haven't used the Linux client in years, so I don't know if it's on par with Windows/macOS versions, but I imagine the biggest selling point is downloading your playlists/library for offline listening. Plus, IIRC, the web version (and third-party clients) don't allow listening to the highest quality versions.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 75.0 ms ] threadMusic streaming helped to almost double music industry revenue.
https://www.statista.com/chart/4713/global-recorded-music-in...
> Moreover, notes Werde, within the pie chart detailing the total revenue that Spotify generates through music streaming, “roughly 70% of it is going to rights holders,” he says. The actual recording artists? “They’re keeping anywhere between 5% and a quarter.”
The impact on actual album sales likely hits hard, too; I recall an artist on NPR talking about how one CD sale nets them more into their actual pocket than a hundred thousand streams.
> So none of [the royalty system] makes sense... if a song is played on the radio, 100% of the royalties go to the songwriter. But if the same song is played on a streaming service, only about 20% of the royalties go to the songwriter. Where does that come from?"
The point is that "helped to almost double music industry revenue" from upthread doesn't actually help the folks I want helped; it's a misleading stat.
You may be able to do it with a smaller label that is very friendly to artists, but you most likely aren't going to be able to access the most in-demand producers, have a label pay for all of your bills/food/rent/etc while you focus on the album.
But if they want to procure the services of the publishers, then they have to agree to the terms.
It's totally possible an artist makes a break on the internet. Sarah Crean blew up from 200 monthly listeners to almost 200,000 overnight because a music TikToker posted about how great her songs are as an independent artist. (TBH it is, go check it out)
Being independent is totally a way you can go, but if you'd want to make money in the industry to really live off of you have 2 options:
- Work a job (or 2) for hours a day to keep yourself fed/housed while also doing the job of 5-10 people to try to get your music noticed enough to make money directly from fans. - Sign up with a label, immediately get your daily life taken care of and focus on your music full time.
Sadly, for a lot of artists, the promise of being able to quit your job and focus on your passion full time is an offer too lucrative to turn down. It's an exploitative industry, but when it works it works. And when it fails, it's the artist that's left on the side of the highway. Labels are like casinos, the house never loses.
70% percent of Spotify revenue goes to the right holders vs ~40% of a CD sale. That artist must have signed really bad deal, or he/she is selling CDs themself which makes comparison really misleading.
As in any passion-driven industry: artists/creative gets shafted and exploited by middlemen (music labels, game studios/publishers, movie studios, etc.) solely because there's a never-ending stream of passionate individuals that will be exploited to have their creations out in the world.
But who needs to buy a song? Spotify (and Pandora, Grooveshark, etc.) brought the same streaming feature from YouTube and Netflix to music. That was even more consumer friendly.
[1] https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1413534752699830275
That said, their podcasting play has been poorly executed and I imagine they are losing plenty here with no real profit solution in sight.
by essentially no ownership what I mean is that the amount of ownership granted to workers via equity is negotiated as part of overall compensation in wage labor market (market means it's as low as each company can competitively get away with, so just saying the share exists does not mean it's of the same class), the majority ownership is elsewhere and there are a lot of non-workers who need to get rich off their work. commenting that ESOPs give workers and their owners the same sense of stakeholder ownership is as interesting as saying america has a universally flat ownership class structure because everyone can buy a share on the market
I rarely watch it since the move away from YouTube but as far as I'm aware they haven't released numbers.
During the pandemic he had a lot of notoriety and relevance because he would platform opinion contrary to the establishment governmental health authorities. To a large degree because of the mis/disinformation guidelines on social media sites, his podcast was the only place a lot of that information could be found and his show gained popularity with a new silo of listeners. He achieved a lot of relevance from that group…and the media because of it, which was hellbent on attempting to “correct” his allegedly dangerous opinions.
And I suppose more famously they did make Joe Rogan exclusive to Spotify as well, and he's probably the biggest name in podcasting
Don't forget also forcefully add Podcasts to the UI and not allow hiding them. Also some irritating prompts in the initial rollout that kept begging you to try podcasts.
I basically unsubscribed and switched to YT Music because of that.
It's one thing for a company to offer a new service, it's another to try and push shit on consumers that aren't interested.
Not at Spotify, it happens too many places.
Now it seems like since the FAANGs are doing it everyone else is jumping on board. Tech layoffs have become trendy. That's a pretty surprising outcome.
The people who were employees and didn't get laid off, they worked extra hours.
If you are flexible, layoffs are probably good for the economic reorganization. If you aren't flexible, this is probably an incredibly stressful time.
The worst is being the team that shuts the lights off behind them, you can expect high expectations paired with salary cuts and getting dumped into the labor pool at the bottom of the market. If things magically do go well those rewards flow to the investors.
So far I've only been in the 2nd group and it sucks.
What do they all do?
I feel sometimes that a lot of the HN folks work on small-scale companies, releasing MVPs and don't have much of an idea about the operations side of a larger operation. It's easy to think in MVP terms, it's really, really hard to understand the nuances (and costs) that scaling that to hundreds of millions of users across dozens to hundred+ countries entail.
[0]: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/whatsapps-55-employee...
Those who find the last sentence counterintuitive should stop to note that if you use WhatsApp today you're interacting with a company with tens of thousands of employees.
Maybe it's a bit better. Is it 10000x better, though? I used Whatsapp before and after, and I find it hard to believe.
(One thing it's definitely better at, though: anything you say will almost instantaneously turn into an ad on the next website you visit.)
Of course there's some level of overhiring but whatever comment here saying that 1/10, or 1/2, or whatever other percentage is what is needed is baseless speculation on some non-informed guess. Without knowing the insides it's just baseless speculation, and even in the inside you'd need to be in a higher level of management to have a decent overview of what's waste (and why it's waste) vs what's actually needed.
Still sounds simpler than what Spotify does.
Just thinking about dealing with payment processing, regulatory environment of music licensing, customer support, and record labels around all countries on which they operate makes my head hurt a little.
But then again, your bad take is the reason I keep coming back to HN. I always find it amusing how people here always seem to have all the answers for things they never worked with. Most of the times I think people being butthurt for whatever reason.
This is outsourced.
> customer support
"Can't find the solution you're looking for? Here's how to get help from our experts. Note: We currently don't offer support by phone."
And half of what they do have is outsourced to "community members".
> regulatory environment of music licensing
This, this is what they do. So that's something. Is it 9600 people something? Apparently not since they already shaved off 6% of the work force earlier this year. It would seem their own CEO appears to agree with the take they are overweight.
Selling hardware around the world has tremendous regulatory burden as well. If you can't imagine the complexities of designing, sourcing and selling hardware products around the world maybe think harder?
Let the chips fall where they may. It isn't like it's the first or even biggest layoff for Spotify this year.
The Spotify most people know (finding and playing songs, creating playlists, recommendations), which obviously very important, is probably a tiny fraction of the complexity for the company.
I would wager the vast majority of the employees at Spotify are working on everything else needed to enable the above. The artists portal, analytics and royalties, paying the labels, paying the artists, legal for every country, etc.
Someone who knows could probably elaborate more than me on everything needed to run a company like that.
Does that require 8000 people? Debatable, but it's certainly more complex than clicking a song and playing it.
EDIT: A quick glimpse at job listing for Spotify on LinkedIn shows:
* Client Partner in India
* Business Operations in Nigeria
* Creator Partner Manager in Mexico
* Artist & Partnerships Manager in Egypt
* NLP Research Scientist in the USA
* Director of Sales in Singapore
Remember Spotify has approx. the same number of premium subscribers as Netflix has subscribers, so it's not exactly tiny.
In the Age of AI, even before 2023 and ChatGPT, localization is a very automatable+contractor heavy job that is very easy to complete. All of africa might need 3-4 teams of 20 people total, and that's including sales/marketing. Maybe double for South America.
The reason tech companies have expanded so much is it looks better when an 8000 employee company controls the worlds music than when an 800 person company does. Same with Google, Facebook, AirBnB, Netflix, etc. The tech monopolies want to make they monopolies seem less ridiculous to regulators.
No.
Over-hiring is probably the same everywhere. When "times are good", everyone in the organisation wants to hire because their number of subordinates makes them seem more important and accomplished.
Localisation isn’t just about language - consider payment requirements, legal and regulatory specific challenges, pricing strategy, regional licensing, there might be specific features required to support low bandwidth (eg carrier agreements), if you want to ad-support like Spotify you will need a team to sell ads… it’s hardly a chatgpt + few contractors job.
With a few k more you might plug leaks, and do actual maintenance of the ship. While you’re not always firefighting, you're also mostly just doing basic maintenance to ensure people don’t always work at 3am bailing out the ship to barely keep it afloat. No actual new fancy features being added to your ship.
If you want to actually build NEW features on your speedboat, you need even more people. And if you care about features, and not burning out employees, that’s how you get to 8k.
(Actual numbers may vary per business)
Seriously, what do you expect the answer to be? Have you worked in any large org with thousands of employees? They are all pretty similar, there's tech debt, there's new initiatives, there is maintenance to be done. You need to work in one to understand how the whole machine works, there's no simple answer to be given on HN about what they are all up to, it's a mix of all of the above as it'd be in any large org...
- N people to just juggle live incidents/emergencies. Actually triage, live, why the Desantis campaign launch on Twitter isn't working. Give the server more RAM, spin up more instances, pray it works.
- M+N people to do the work to prevent the incidents/emergencies (maintenance). Actually ensure the next big giant event on the streaming service doesn't cause failures. Create automatic scaling up of new capacity as needed. But avoid overprovisioning and costing the company a bazillion $$. Get to the bottom of what triggered the incident. Build practices, runbooks, etc the next time this happens.
- M+N+L people to actually create new stuff. Create a new feature on the live streaming service to comment or somesuch. (and all the work M+N people do to handle incidents with this new feature)
So X * (M+N+L) people if every product area is trying to create new stuff.
But the reality is most teams have T people where M < T < (M+N+L). Which is very company dependent.
Spotify has dozens of consumer facing product areas. Probably many more for creators, record labels, admins, etc etc
- Regularly have to restart the app
- Regularly on bluetooth headphones will get an error that you cannot play any songs.
This is literally by design. Amazon doesn't want you to search, they want you to buy what they suggest on the homepage. Spotify doesn't want you listening to what you want, they want to shove profitable songs down your throat. you know how radio in america is controlled by the labels? Same with spotify.
To do more (ex open in different markets) you need more people, but with more people you need more support people, which also need to be supported in turn ...
Next thing you know you have 5 engineers on Chaos Monkey so that your 20 SREs can more easily test their globally distributed low-latency CDN. You also have region lawyer manager VPs who manage lawyer teams per country, and are in turn managed by your glonal Head of Lawyering. Who also has an administrative assistant otherwise theyd lose head over the schedule and their tasks...
And we didn't even get to the programmers yet.
In rockets, to go a bit faster or haul a bit more mass, you need a lot more fuel.
Orgs are the same. Except they don't explode. Usually.
The company is absolutely heavy with highly paid department staff who are all working on fantasyware that does nothing to improve all of the things people complain about Spotify.
Not really?
I mean, it's a music streaming platform with global presence (and to my experience, with no downtime), dealing with the regulatory environment, record labels, payment processing, and taxation across all different jurisdictions. Also needs to have customer service support in all languages it operates.
If you ask me, 8k doesn't sound absurd at all. Maybe a bit on the high end of what I would have guessed, but I'm possibly not accounting for new things they might be developing as well.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/06/apple-podcasts-subscr...
Eh, as someone who never listened to the big guys or use Apple's podcasts, I'd hardly give Apple credit. It was just impossible to put podcasts behind a paywall after they were free for a decade.
It truly seems like a stupid thing. Reminds me of how one of the satellite radio companies would buy a popular radio host, and that popular radio host would lose their popularity in exchange for millions.
Except that it didn't.
Before Spotify, "podcasting" meant "open medium based on web standards". Spotify embraced/extended/extinguished it to the point that even technical people happily call shows distributed on closed platforms like Spotify and YouTube "podcasts".
Since freeing the word "podcasting" from its open, standards-based chains, Spotify now claims to be the largest podcast listening platform with 25% of U.S. listeners. As a closed platform, there's no way to independently verify whether Spotify is cooking their metrics books.
Yes, this is Spotify's argument to anyone who says it's bad that they liberated "podcasting" from web standards.
> The fact is that Apple checkmated them by allowing monetization of podcasts directly.
That's not how it works — as with Spotify, listeners pay Apple, and then Apple gives podcasters a percentage of the proceeds. https://podcasters.apple.com/support/892-apple-podcasters-pr...
It was always a labo(u)r of love, and never seemed to have widespread support, due to the tiny userbase.
Spotify's UI is wonky and lacks visual appeal at most times for me. Having to frequently go back to the app to control or change what is playing is quite annoying, it really only needs to be a small scale floating window, as music player tech really hasn't changed dramatically since winamp. Spotify is not a revolutionary company at all, even Soundcloud (still not great to independent musicians either) has had a more visually appealing layout that values artists and the music content more than Spotify, and they've been that way for decades now.
This is false.
Did Spotify spend time on that?
"Spotify for Linux is a labor of love from our engineers that wanted to listen to Spotify on their Linux development machines. They work on it in their spare time and it is currently not a platform that we actively support." [1]
[1] https://www.spotify.com/us/download/linux/
It's sad that desktop apps are so bad nowadays that we prefer the browser. I guess that's what happens when desktop apps are just packaged web apps.
I'm on mobile, so I can't check.