> 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).
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I got laid off in Jan 2023 and they only gave me the 2 weeks, but was able to at least negotiate that my end date fell on on Feb 1 so I could at least have healthcare until the end of the month.
"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.
>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.
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.
>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."
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.
Spotify is actually trying to make money. If the goal of running Spotify was to get everyone to listen to the CEO's crappy garage band, maybe then it would be a valid comparison.
> 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.
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.
- 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.
That is meaningless when the vast majority of users aren't paying and won't pay for the foreseeable future. Advertisers pay, and Elon is doing all he can to drive away advertisers. Ad quality on Twitter has severely degraded over the past two months and we all know why.
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...
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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...
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.
I love it when people parrot what they heard - what misinformation? Do you mean the Robert Kennedy stuff? I can have my own strong views that the vaccines were useful and still enjoy content - if you just consume what you hear and relay it of course you shouldn't be around "fake news and stupid theories". Saying that 99% of Rogans podcasts are not like this.
>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.
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.
‘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?
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?
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?
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"
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].
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.
Ha, that's fair, I missed that. I wasn't optimistic about them in 2019, but sinking ship would definitely be a strong claim about that time, and my point is moot about that time.
Probably some motivated forgetfulness on my part, because I'm just so glad that their attempts to bind podcasts exclusively to their platform seem to be failing/diminishing.
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
That would be Spotify's Direct Distribution Contract, something they also established in 2018, shortly before (or in parallel with) their podcast acquisition strategy.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
The Mona Lisa is art, and it is a "you can like it or not" situation. A podcast that allows for spreading misinformation about vaccines can be responsible for the deaths of many
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.
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.
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..)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Not absolute, but pausing a sub with an explanation sends an immediate message. Which services would you recommend? I'm mostly after a broad and fresh electronic music catalogue.
"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?
Depth and breadth of electronic music catalogue and switching cost. Former is probably narrowing rapidly. What would you recommend? Building Apple's future streaming monopoly isn't particularly appealing. Small perhaps, but pausing a sub with explanation sends a clear signal.
I use a lot of Apple devices and I’m not picky, so Apple Music works well for me. I highly doubt Apple will get a monopoly since Google is also in this space with YouTube Music, so there’s another option for you.
A lot of the smaller players have dropped out of this space, which might be a hint as to why Spotify is leaning in to the podcasts: maybe it’s hard to be independent here with Amazon, Apple, and Google being willing to not make much money on this as they build their moats.
I also lost faith in certain scientists (and many more politicians) during the pandemic. But be wary of generalising about a such a large and interdisciplinary group of people. Voices amplified by the media (indeed like Robert Malone on Rogan's podcast) often grossly misrepresent scientific consensus.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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"
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".
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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?
Before you had two buttons. I'd like songs I really like and add the rest to specific playlists. Now I have to do the cumbersome route via the elipsis, yes. It's just way harder and I do it less. I also still like songs on accident because the button is a fucking plus and not a heart. No idea which idiot at spotify proposed that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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-...
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
> 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
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.
Severance package is 5 months and Q1 will have no shortage of new job postings elsewhere. Yes this is probably not great for mental health but financially they should be fine.
Having looked at the job market, there are less job postings currently than in previous years.
While overall there will still be more jobs than qualified people to fill them. Let's not pretend like the employee market is full of people who've just been laid off from very reputable companies.
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.
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.
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.
Workers in the US are routinely and in large numbers thrown under the bus by their corporations in search of profit. Many don't have paid paternal/maternal leave, low or no vacation days, not all employers cover medical costs, and you can be fired more or less on the spot. Now this treatment simply is getting extended to the previously privileged "laptop class". Spotify is an example of the rare EU "unicorn", it's just sad to see that it is managed the American way.
In Europe even fast food workers or servers/waiters are paid a reasonable salary and have vacation days and their medical costs covered by their employer. Also, labor laws in Europe are much stricter and it's harder for a company to fire their workers so easily. Just see what the unionized Tesla workers are doing in Sweden. In terms of worker rights and job security, US simply doesn't compare to Europe.
It's good that at the very least the laid off workers in Sweden will get unemployment benefits from the government, in addition to the severance Spotify pays them. I believe it's something that amounts to monthly payments equal to 70-80% of their salary for at least 400 days. That, hopefully, will ensure that they have plenty of time and opportunity to find something else.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
I wonder how much of this is led by the likes of paying $200 million to sign up Joe Rogan or $25 million for Harry and Megan. That's a big chunk of change. 9,000 employees too - 17% of the workforce out the door.
Spotify made a gamble that having some headline Podcasters would build the listener market. Podcasters release regularly and have a different potential for becoming viral compared to musicians so it's a valid commercial decision to make.
Seems like their headline gambles didn't work but googling suggests that the podcast listener market increased 10% in the last year so I think they'll probably try again.
Anecdotally, most of the podcasts I listen to advertise as being on Spotify, especially the ones that skew towards a more mainstream audience. I think Spotify's podcast play has largely worked to gain the mindshare, it's really just them and Apple Podcasts.
I suspect this means that Spotify subscribers are listening to plenty of podcasts, but perhaps podcasts failed to bring new listeners into Spotify.
Podcasting has also been called the slowest growing new medium in the history of new media. I can't imagine it's earning its keep, relative to those big initial payouts. Meanwhile, the shows that are brought into subscription-only world systematically fail to attract new listeners; it is hard to use podcast exclusives to grow market share. Especially the talking head variety, which exist in abundance outside the pay wall.
I both agree and disagree with you here. The expectation of the podcasting business to be full of great opportunities and monetary gain was (probably) misguided, but 25% market share in an established market in just a couple of years when there were big players holding a majority share is still a huge feat.
Will it pay off? Probably not. But is 25% a big share? Yes.
Apple Music (Jun 2015) and Google Play Music (Nov 2011) launched after Spotify (Jul 2011 in the US). I think the 4 year delay by Apple is what allowed Spotify to become so popular in the first place.
The problem for Spotify is that they need a far bigger share of the market to be able to have negotiating power against the 3 record labels that they have to buy the music from. Apple/Alphabet/Amazon do not care as much because re-selling the music at cost or even as a loss leader is not a big deal to them.
Apple and Google have 20% and 16% respectively. Considering the amazing platform boost that those two giants have I think 25% is very impressive.
But I agree that podcastings growth has been very slow. I think that there are a
lot of factors influencing that. The biggest in my opinion is that listening to a podcast is more intimate than any other media (including broadcast radio) and that factor both slows uptake and decreases churn. Not a marketer though so just making that up.
Spotify itself is not sustainable and going for the podcast crowed...
I still think it was not a smart move...
Its like that blue haired streamer going from twitch to what ever the msft clone of it was.
Yes Spotify is super popular but I hear more and more people moving away from it to for example apple music or other services.
They don't focus on the core anymore that much.
For example they are super late on the lossless audio train.
Yes you can hear a difference from spotify and apple music.
I tested it with all my colleagues in the office. You can clearly hear that apple music or tidal sounds better then the spotify versions.
At least with my AirPods or my fancy Master&Dynamic over-ear headphones, there is a pretty big difference in Apple Music vs others, but I don’t think it's necessarily about bitrate. I think Apple just gets higher quality masters of some songs. Same thing as Tidal when I used that, but Apple seems even a step further at this point (which is unfortunate because I really don’t want to rely on a mega-corp for everything).
Especially the ones with the Dolby Atmos (Spatial Audio) mixes. Even if you don’t have super high-res headphones, the difference in dynamic range is pretty obvious, and it makes songs just feel more alive.
I don’t have any stats to back this up but it seems that Apple Music has at least managed to somewhat buck the trend of the “loudness wars” with the masters they use. I wonder if this is actually published or written about anywhere…
I have AirPods pro and the sony xm4. Even on bluetooth you can hear the difference. The sound stage is just bigger. The highs are more clear and the bass is more subtle.
I was once remaking some hiphop beats from there samples and you can hear the difference even more when you have a remade beat (its not 100% the same) you can hear what the compression has done to the sample.
You won't get a representative answer here because tech folk can be specific about what and how they listen, so our answers will make it appear like a big deal.
I will venture that most people don't notice or care.
I played the same song from random services. They did not see the service nor the laptop. YouTube/Spotify/Apple/Tidal (We did not had access to more). YT usually was the worse followed by Spotify and then depending on the Genre either Tidal or apple won. All of them were in the highest settings.
Just curious, I have no stake in this, but did you have the "high quality audio" settings turned on for Spotify? I know they've had them in the past, I don't know what the specific name is for it these days.
The xm4 use Bluetooth and thus compress audio during transmission. Everyone of your listeners thus listened to lossy audio.
Fwiw there is not a single scientific listening test ever where participants were able to tell the difference between high bitrate mp3 and wav. Not even in perfect studio conditions.
Probably didn’t help that the app was so bad for months after Joe switched over that Joe was saying “sorry the app is so bad, they tell me they are working on it”.
How much audience did they fail to convert? How much harder did that make building momentum?
To put it into context 9000 workers on an average of $75000 is $675 mil a year on salaries alone, so Joe's 200 over 3 and a half years, harry and meg etc etc isn't a big a deal as it might sound. The elephant is the 9000 staff IMO.
let me fix that for ya:
"We realized we don't need those specific 1500 jobs/workers."
"Joe Rogan is the most popular podcaster."
If cutting those 1500 jobs would put Spotify in serious harm (i.e. devs, licensing, IT security), they wouldn't let any of them go. But they do. So they are either very foolish OR they know something(s) we don't.
They were foolish/fickle/myopic/selfish to hire them in the first place. Companies have treated beneficial market conditions as an opportunity to make a land-grab for employees without a plan for how to afford them just a couple of years later - after the employee has organised their life and their family's life around the expectation that they were more than a temporary contractor.
If an individual took advantage of cheap credit to buy a car & flogged it while being underwater on the loan shortly after, we'd rightly judge it as a financial mistake. When a CEO does it with people's livelihoods and social circles at stake, it's applauded.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
Well, sure, there's infinite room for scope-creep. That doesn't take away from a minimal solution that works well from the user's point of view - "I don't want to see this, make it go away".
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.
> 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.
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?
> 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.
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"
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And the the "tolerant" Left wonders why the Right is so upset at them, and the response globally is the election of strong pro-nationalist, "populist" candidates.
Why should someone walk around afraid of being seen associating with Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson? They're certainly not promoting Jewish genocide, unlike others.
I never claimed to be tolerant ;) Listening to Rogan or Peterson are indicators that you might be into alternative medicine trash like horse dewormers and vagina rocks; or you might oppose public health policies, or gender care for people dissimilar to you. There's an entire universe of podcasts to listen to on every possible topic, and you choose to listen to the one that hosts quacks. That's not the kind of person I'm interested in supporting or associating with, hence the side-eye thing.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
>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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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…
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!
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.
Except it's not just that, is it? They have more than one product. They have the desktop app, the web app, iOS app, Android app, apps for smart TVs, apps for smart speakers, internal admin apps, apps for artists, apps for venues, apps for labels.
Even if you narrow down to focusing on just one of those like the desktop app. There are so many sub-features. Playlist management, playback management, search, audiobooks, podcasts, merch, event ticketing, groups, collaborative playlists, local files, upsells from free to paid, notifications. I could go on.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
The trouble with "call out bullshit" is that the commenters taking this approach usually overestimate their comments and underestimate their provocations; and do the opposite for comments and provocations coming from the other side. This compounds to quite a bias—and does a lot more damage to the threads than they realize or intend.
It just leads to a downward spiral and (eventually) scorched earth, and none of that is what we're here for. We want curious conversation and interesting threads.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Honestly (for someone also working with audio) these team descriptions sound like they would idle most of the time.
My usual yardstick is Apollo programme development team size: about 600 developers. Relatively few tasks are substantially more challenging than writing code that would get people to the Moon and back. There have to be some that are as hard or harder naturally. But when you see a commercial company that has an order of magnitude or two more devs than that, using modern tooling and conveniences, it's hard to fathom.
Not all of the employees are working on the tech side. I can only imagine Spotify has a ton of business operations, sales, legal, etc. It's a worldwide company, too.
And when it comes to product development teams, 3 is pretty minimal. I'm sure most teams have more people than that. I'm simply pointing out that there are a lot of corners of functionality within the platform and one way you can press the gas pedal to accelerate your roadmap is fragmenting areas of concern and forming teams around those fragments. If the conditions for making those bets change, you undo that by consolidating teams, lengthening roadmaps, and downsizing staff (in some order).
> 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.
I'm not defending how Spotify strategizes or delivers. I'm just saying that given their surface area, it's not difficult for me to imagine that a big chunk of the company is running on developing a bunch of parallel efforts.
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.
I didn't want podcasts, on the other hand I have a few friends who listen to podcasts exclusively on Spotify because they were already listening to music on it.
It might not be a good idea for you, or for me, but there's value on providing it. The churn from adding podcasts was probably low enough to make it worthwhile as a business.
Exclusive podcasts on the other hand seem to have backfired immensely.
People all had a podcast app that worked fine. It was classic embrace/extend/extinguish. It has made many perfectly good paid programs just flat out shut down.
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.
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.
> Supporting half a billion constant users around the world
I am sure curl does too, with one guy running it. Spotify is not a telephone company. The engineering work hardly scale with the amount of users. There should be a need for some extra sales staff, lawyers and translators per market.
This is one bit I don't understand. You either unionize or don't. If you do, you do it fast or you lose it.
All management hates unions, and especially the management of SV companies. They will do everything to crush it. So you either do it fast or lose employees as the management will attack first.
Obviously you don't need all those people. Almost no company apart from like one-man companies or dying companies employ only the people they need. You employ as many people as possible that generate additional profit, short or long-term. Do you need to hire a conversion specialist? Of course not, though if she costs $400k a year while improving conversion by 10% the payoff is absolutely massive, and you'd have to be an idiot not to hire her.
I'm surprised people don't realize this, especially on hackernews.
I mean, yeah. How many engineers do you need? 5-6 for the backend, 3-4 DevOps, maybe some more for the various frontends... say, 20?
I can't imagine the whole thing can't be done with between 30 to 50 engineers in total.
And everyone else, what do they do? Cold calls to the entire planet to go subscribe, or what? Also alright, some lawyers and "compliance" people, financiers, marketers,...
Don't know. I'd struggle to fill a roster of 200 people for Spotify.
> Clearly not working on the core functionality of the app - heh.
Sadly, yes. That they become so tone-deaf is something I'll never condone though I do understand why it's happening (or so I think: is it the gobs of money that make people comfortable and disconnected from the bread and butter of the company?)
At the time WhatsApp was only forwarding messages from user to user. They didn't deal with different contracts and license deals in 180 countries. Nowadays they have a lot more country specific regulations to deal with, and also a much higher headcount.
Internal tools for licensing, library ingestion, tools to support data science, customer payments in however many countries they're in, artist payout, search, recommendations, encoding/playback (probably even multiple teams for multiple platforms), whatever their ad sales platform looks like, ad selection, concert listings, merch sales, wrapped (which is probably their most loved feature)
Some of these are a team per region, some are a team per platform, some are entire divisions
I remember when rolling out Yandex.Music (a similar streaming service) in 2010 we had maybe a dozen developers rounding way up, a half dozen strong BizRel team, perhaps three DevOps and a few managers. Totalling around 30 people, though dozens more would do some things by the virtue of being integrated in much larger Yandex team.
Obviously we had way fewer regions/catalogue/listeners/platforms, especially back then.
Whelp, even for tech-core products, number of engineers are often very insignificant compared to other stuff(legal, license, buying, acquisition, hr, advertising, marketing, sales, security, management, decision board, product management, product owners, agile team, release team, test/QA, support etc.).
I used to think that, tech companies could do with like what 200 people max, but after working on few places for a while now, I am no longer surprised, specially when your service spans the globe(or even multiple countries or continents), you really need a huge team to keep troubles out and the wheels going.
Why would it be a satire? I've worked on much harder problems than moving anywhere between 1MB to 20MB files from a CDN to user's devices, and we were 11 people, responsible for dozens of terabytes per workday.
Obviously I am not well-versed in all the legal requirements and many other commercial aspects, but to me 9000 is quite insane and surely can be optimized away.
I wouldn't be surprised if Spotify moves a petabyte of images a day, I can't even guess the amount of data from their songs and videos. But obviously just moving data isn't what requires a lot of employees.
Because it's like a cliché example of an engineer with the view that some relatively successful real-world product—that they have no real insight into—is far easier to implement than the people who _are_ familiar with it have. You see this literally all the time, to the extent that it's become a meme, and it's hard to believe anybody would make that argument seriously.
Spotify might have too many engineers on-staff; reducing the service to "moving between 1MB to 20MB files from a CDN to user's devices" is a flatly uncurious approach to understanding what engineering challenges they might face or if that's really the case. It's a service that _adds_ 100k songs a day, for goodness sake.
Don't you think there is big difference between moving files to some users' devices vs moving files to literally half a billion users with almost 100% uptime? Not considering problems associated with the scale of Spotify and instantly dismissing the task of managing that as something trivial (or at least easier than your work) makes you sound arrogant.
Lmao, I love this comment so much because of how incredibly uninformed it is. 5-6 backend engineers to run Spotify in 185 countries... I've seen a lot of ridiculous comments when it comes to company sizes, but yours is probably the best one I've seen in my life, thanks for the laugh.
Is it because you've never worked at a non-startup or how come you have that opinion? Like, you just have no idea what's required/useful and you can't even imagine it?
I'd love to hear how you split the workload between these 5 backenders.
Obviously I can't be well informed since I don't work in there, I am saying that the core functionality of moving bytes around the globe is not something you need hundreds of people for -- because I worked on similar teams. In fact the DevOps team was times bigger than the programmers which might be one clue in Spotify's case.
Have you ever worked at a company with more than say 1k employees that's active in more than one region? I'm honestly intrigued in your opinion, it sounds similar to what I thought back in uni before I had any work experience, but from your profile you don't look like a complete junior, so I'd really like to better understand how you can think Spotify could possibly operate with 5 backenders.
I am 43. :D And with 22 years of experience, 95% of which in backend and some sysadmin-ing.
Though I have only once worked in a huge corporation (and I couldn't understand what did they need all the people for either).
I was almost always working in smaller tight-knit teams that got a LOT of stuff done (too much contracting for my now 40+ y/o self).
So I err on the side of "be efficient" and that's not even for the purposes of cost efficiency. It's more about being able to iterate with a reasonable speed. My observations from my career support what Bill Gates and others said i.e. that the productivity of a tech team starts to decline when it goes beyond 7 people. Generalization, sure, but it's very often true.
As for the 5 backenders thing, OK, my perspective might have been too narrow i.e. "writing code to move bytes from our servers to CDNs to user's devices can't be that hard" and I mostly stand behind it. Sure you might need much more devs to author complex login systems, SSO and such (if you even need it) but again, after the product somewhat stabilizes, how much backenders do you really need?
I am also interested in your opinion. My entire career has been a proof that small and tight-knit teams get sh1t done and everyone else drowns in bureaucracy.
For larger companies, there's a lot of "hidden" functions that you're probably not aware of as a customer. Just payment integrations in 100+ countries, with all the local regulations and reporting requirements is probably going to be rough to handle with a single team of 5 backenders. Then we have functions like marketing content management (every country has different copy and will probably want to be able to surface things slightly differently to maximize conversion), artist/podcast/audiobook tooling, the ad platform, hardware integration (for Spotify in your car/speaker etc), legal stuff (including GDPR and its equivalents), metrics & data analysis tools. And much more, and those are just some of the things you don't really see as an end-user.
I absolutely, 100%, agree that a small and focused team is the best way to get shit done, but for a large company the size of Spotify the amount of work is absolutely massive. I wouldn't be surprised at all if many teams at Spotify are small and tight-knit and doing great work at delivering kick-ass anti-fraud systems or moderation software to detect and report child porn etc.
Not to mention the obvious thing where the higher your revenue, the less percentual impact each employee needs to have to more than pay for themselves. While you might think it's ridiculous to have a full team dedicated solely to the main marketing page, that could be extremely worth it if that team increases conversion by 10%, as an example.
But as another commenter pointed out -- it's actually 13900 people.
Again, everything you say it's true but I am finding it hard to imagine the scale and the degree of the problems that mandate ~14k people. Sure, 1000. Maybe 2500.
>I mean, yeah. How many engineers do you need? 5-6 for the backend, 3-4 DevOps, maybe some more for the various frontends... say, 20?
So Spotify should bring you in as the CTO, right? How can you make such a confident claim that you know better how to run the company that has beat the daylights out of every other music streaming platforms (including Google, Amazon, and Apple)?
According to LinkedIn, Spotify currently has 13,900 full-time employees, with 3620 in Engineering (26%), 1850 in Arts & Design (13%), 1000 in Media & Communications (7%), and roughly 800 each in Marketing, Business Development, and Sales (5-6% each).
Over the last 12 months, headcount has risen dramatically within Sales (+32%), Arts & Design (+19%), and Business Development (+21%). In comparison, Engineering has seen just a 2% rise, Media and Comms at 0%, and marketing at +10%.
If I had to guess, lots of these layoffs will begin to affect their headcounts within these functions that have experienced rapid year-on-year growth, and affect their Engineering function (despite being their largest) proportionally less than these other functions.
I would be interested in how you came to your conclusion of needing only 200 employees for a company of this scale? Any company of spotify's scale will have entire functions that will be distributed globally and working on a variety of projects or products. For example, Spotify has almost 400 data scientists. Off the top of my head, I can't fathom what I would have 400 data scientists working on, but I can easily believe that a company with over $12bn in revenue and 574 million listeners this year could find a use for them.
exactly 0 engineers working on the stupid "enhanced shuffle" or whatever its called that I am forced to toggle through in order to switch between shuffle and non-shuffle, and makes me wait 5 seconds while adding random songs to my liked songs that I dont want and did not ask for. The amount of computing resources wasted on this trash is just insane, both on the backend for the song recommendations and on the frontend where my phone is frozen for 5 seconds. It escapes me how such a big company is fine with having that this abomination of a feature in their app. rant over
In addition to the technical work of keeping the servers running and the infra reliable, there is probably a great deal of work getting content licensing deals, working on marketing, managing the whole edifice, and stuff like that. They need a huge number of content “suppliers” to get basically every song in every country. They undoubtedly have a large number of developers working on apps for every platform, keeping up with all that attendant complexity.
On top of that, the company wants to innovate and probably has teams working on hardware and whatnot.
Whether it’s efficient is not clear, but most people there probably work hard on their particular daily grind.
When I was junior I used to buy this explanation, but 9,000 developers is probably more then are actually working on huge projects like Linux or .NET it’s approx 100 times more developers then you’d ever reasonably hire. It’s just for financial reasons it’s cheap to double up of devs instead of giving raises
Because I have experience in the industry. Where is anyone getting any of this info? Don’t just believe these guys they are fake accounts repeating marketing info.
I also have some 2 decades of experience in the industry, so please, share me your reasoning, how did you arrive at these numbers? Just a ballpark, no appeal to authority as I believe we are both similarly seasoned...
Maybe. But for perspective it’s approximately 1/40th of the number of people that were employed at the peak of the Apollo moon landing missions (400,000 people) and that required the support of over 20,000 firms and universities.
Last I checked Apollo didn't have to deal with worldwide music licensing or have an audience of 500 million people across the world it needs to serve.
This comparison is fundamentally dumb. What's next, asking why you need hundreds of thousands of employees to run worldwide store business and comparing it to Voyager program?
Well the evidence sure seems strong they could have done the same job with at least 13% fewer people. I wonder how many of the remaining are also absolutely essential for the service to operate and grow?
Music licensing, streaming and revenue sharing is hardly a “go to the moon in the 60s” complexity problem. And having a lot of end users doesn’t mean you need massive employee head counts in digital service delivery, it just means you have a lot of customers and need to build your digital delivery systems to handle a larger scale which is generally expressed as a modest pressure on engineering groups to build most scalable systems and not a rocket science level problem.
The high head counts are always present at the end of boom cycles, but a LOT of what companies are doing at the end of these cycles is simply busywork.
The busywork problem exists because managers equate business with productivity, and their organizations reflect that.
The perception is not just that a busy worker is engaged and making an effort, but even that their industriousness gives them a higher value than their less busy colleagues. But really only a relatively small number of employees do the vast majority of the work (Pareto principle). The whole corporate management theory sets up a dynamic in which two office workers completing identical tasks can be judged on their busyness, rather than their results. Who appears to be more engaged: the busy worker who skips lunch to get things finished, or the efficient worker who finishes early and uses the time saved to buy groceries online?
This, when applied at scale, leads to highly staffed organizations with a LOT of busy people who don’t really do that much compared to their potential for output.
If you don’t see the metaphor between a large engineering project and an engineering organization that seems over staffed, that’s fine. But do try to have the social grace to not call people dumb. There is just no call for insults here.
Why are you mixing up complexity of work with volume of work (and comparing incomparable industries at that)?
Spotify's work might not be getting people alive to the Moon with 1960s tech, but there is A LOT of it since they need to cover so much more.
Rest of your post is pretty much bloviating with assumptions you have no grounds for - not to mention your almost insulting minimization of work that's not TrueEngineeringWorkForMoon(tm).
I've worked in streaming industry and I can tell you that there is a stupid amount of work getting all the licenses and content in order across all the nations that Spotify is present it. You can call it "busywork", but it's no more busywork than jockeying JavaScript to make your CI happy. It's critical for company operations - Spotify lives and dies on amount of content they have, the speed they get new content and the ability to payout artists across the world for their content. Not to mention take money from people across the world.
It's outright hillarious how everyone here underestimates a problem like "we need to legally pay out money in Germany to Rammstein for a song", it's like watching HBO's Sillicon Valley in real life.
There’s nothing incorrect about pointing out that the modern workplace reinforces busywork over meaningful engineering and managerial headcount justification. The data supports it.
Implying that “Jockeying JavaScript” isn’t real enough engineering work is also a look.
Arguing that engineering projects of scale can’t be compared because one can’t tell the difference between volume and complexity is rough conversation.
The idea that engineering on large technical projects can’t be compared across industries or eras isn’t true in an objective sense either.
Not super happy I took the time to reply to you and got told I was to get called blovating. That’s unkind.
That while stating that “everyone on HN underestimates things” and doesn’t understand how hard problems like paying someone for streaming actually is exactly the kind of nonsensical thinking that is building these large headcount companies.
Your argument is that “global payments are harder than people realize.”
But it’s simply not true. They are profoundly easier than they have ever been in history and people on hacker news are many of the very people creating those payment rails.
So I think calling their opinions “hilarious” while insulting the entire community and the person you’re talking to… it’s not… great. Calling it a “real life” Silicon Valley kinda is though, because well, it kind of literally is. This is the website of the most successful Silicon Valley incubator.
I come on here to learn and have positive interactions with people, grow intellectually and this isn’t quite what I am looking for. Thanks for your interaction though. Have a great day.
Apollo wasn't travelling all over 100+ countries scooping up podcasts and speaking to growing artists though. Your comparison is weird, the goals are quite different.
> They undoubtedly have a large number of developers working on apps for every platform
Yes, if they were at the cutting edge on every platform and constantly adding innovative new features, that could certainly explain 500 of the 9000 employees.
But that still leaves 8,500 employees unexplained.
Developing the software is easy part. Handling and negotiating contracts and licensing agreements for all their music and podcasts (and advertisers) all across the globe is probably the hard part. Plus of course all the marketing, support and related tasks.
Still. There's only ~200 countries, and a good chunk of them either isn't worth having any presence in (no need to negotiate licenses for Somalia), or is so small and has similar laws to surrounding countries that they'll be treated as one bloc by the publishers you negotiate with anyway (all the Pacific statelets e.g.).
Between that and the ability to just contract local lawyers, 45 to (realistically closer to) 90 employees per (relevant) country is still a lot.
Also, spotify outsourced 90% of their support to their community (designated "star" members). There's no hotline either, so no call centres to run, or anything else personnel intensive. (And you'd outsource that anyway, realistically.)
Am I understanding correctly that you're looking for a HN poster to explain to you the complexities involved in maintaining compliance, legal and licensing for a globally distributed service, just so you can decide whether or not to be outraged by the size of Spotify's staff count?
Here’s just one example of where Spotify didn’t actually have enough staff to understand the legal requirements of one single product decision: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24764371
These are probably not all devs/engineers. Usually, selling services/products in multiple countries mean, dedicated legal, HR, accounting replicated in nearly every location where no common treaty exists, and management in large tech tends to have too many levels and adds up quickly as well.
“probably”? I mean, yes it’s a tech company, but it’s a bit surprising anyone would expect it to be much more than 50% engineering. Marketing and customer support alone would have a huge headcount - and given the impact AI tech is having on those areas, I wouldn’t be surprised if they represented a disproportionate fraction of the layoffs.
This is the only valid question here. Bloated workforce is somehow a must-have byproduct of growing cash flow, someone could surely say why. Is it prestige? Is it managers gaining more power by commanding more teams and this workforce then remains? Is it to please shareholders with feature bloat? Is it an actual (one-time?) need to scale up globally?
I hate Xitter like the next guy, but if there is one thing Musk made right is to show you can axe most of the staff of an established platform and you can still have a running global scale operation (ignoring some early downtimes/hiccups and all other, khm, content-related issues). It seems currently they have around 600 full-time engineers.
> I hate Xitter like the next guy, but if there is one thing Musk made right is to show you can axe most of the staff of an established platform and you can still have a running global scale operation (ignoring some early downtimes/hiccups and all other, khm, content-related issues). It seems currently they have around 600 full-time engineers.
Xitter is massively tanking as a company with massive revenue losses since that brilliant idea. Its example proves literally the opposite of what you're claiming - after firings the company is in tailspin of financial losses.
How is the revenue loss a cause for downsizing? I mean bigger revenue loss since Twitter always made losses. If you say lack of moderation (workforce) and thus leaving advertisers, I think that's a minority, and moderators were just a fraction of the people let go.
The current payout scheme is advantageous to popular artists and Spotify, the rest gets ridiculous amounts because all money from subscriptions and advertising is eaten by the former.
Of course they could change the scheme to a more fair one (Spotify gets a fixed amount from your subscription and the rest is divided between artists you listened to in a given month) but the problem is the deal wouldn't be so advantageous to big studios. So basically everybody is subsidizing a few big guys who earn a lot.
Absolutely feel bad for the people that are being let go in today's economy.
When it comes to Spotify in particular, I use it almost daily and I can't say that I've noticed any new features in the past two-three years, other than some semi-confusing reshuffle of where stuff is listed on the home page. Feels like it is an app that is well and truly in maintenance mode - it just does what it says on the tin, with extremely good market penetration.
So genuine non-facetious question as an outsider, what are the people working on? Does it take this many people to operate an app on the scale of Spotify, are there lots of people developing new features that never make it into prod, or is it something else that I haven't thought about?
For comparison the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has around 7000 employees, and they develop and operate multiple Mars rovers, several space telescopes, a whole range satellites and space probes, etc.
I have never had Spotify and would like to understand what people like about it?
Admittedly I pay for YouTube Premium which comes with YouTube Music, so I use that for music. YouTube is kind of an integral part of life I find, everybody uses it. It has so much useful content, it has educational content, product reviews, how to guides, and then of course all the entertainment content. So assuming that probably most people subscribe to YouTube Premium, why Spotify as well?
Where do people have all that time for listening to all those podcasts which Spotify buys to lurk people onto their platform? I don't even have time for Netflix, let alone listening to some podcasts. Time taken up by my work, then my hobby projects, playing sports, playing with my child and spending time with my wife, meeting friends and family on our weekends, going outdoors with the kids or just for us to do something in the real world, cooking fresh food every day, doing regular house work and so forth, where is the time left to binge watch one Netflix series after another or to listen to these podcasts?
Even when I was single and didn't have wife and child I didn't have time for these things. In fact I had even less time because I did even more sports, went clubbing, house parties, dating women, going abroad with friends, etc. was even more time consuming than having a stable family now.
This is not criticism, but genuinely asking, do people who subscribe to those services do anything else in their life or are they just transitioning from Spotify to work to Netflix to bed to Spotify to work to Netflix to bed to... ???
Not Spotify, but I pay for Amazon Music. I listen music all the time, and it also works for 5 of my family members (out of which 1 listens a lot and the rest listen a little). It's cheaper than Youtube Premium and has better quality as far as I can tell.
I don't listen to podcasts, but I know people listen to them in during their commute.
In fact, I am surprised someone with kids and little free time considers Youtube an integral part of life. I watch an average of 2 videos a week, usually skipping most of them. Mostly DIY guides.
Maybe I will subscribe once my kids are in age to watch educational videos, but even then, I am pretty sure I will prefer Curiosity Stream, which I trust waaay more than Youtube for kid-friendly content.
> In fact, I am surprised someone with kids and little free time considers Youtube an integral part of life.
Nursery rhymes on YouTube Premium are a blessing. When we were trying to teach my daughter to eat solids we struggled until we played compilation videos of other babies eating really well and then my daughter started to try to copy them. This was a blessing for the first child who doesn't have an older sibling to copy from. So many other useful scenarios where YouTube really helps.
Then of course all the other content. I love watching people doing reviews of products. For example, last Black Friday we bought an Air Fryer and I wanted to know what is the practical difference between the Ninja Dual drawer and single large drawer with divider. Like I'm already sold on buying a Ninja, just need to know which model and those YouTube videos are fantastic to do this kind of research. Same thign when I bought an expensive coffee machine and the brand had 3 different models which were very similar but with minor crucial differences.
Then of course there are all the podcasts on YouTube as well. I mean if I wanted to listen to Joe Rogan there is no shortage of him on YouTube for instance.
I love that YouTube also has sooooooo much other amazing content. Only 5 days ago when I was cooking in the evening I was rewatching an entire Tennis match, one of the classics between Andy Murray and Roger Federer. It's all on YouTube in high-res. Where else do I get so much value for money? It's definitely integral to our life. YouTube has it all.
> So assuming that probably most people subscribe to YouTube Premium, why Spotify as well?
Because I don't listen to "educational content, product reviews, how to guides" all the time?
I listen to music, and at its core Spotify is still a music streaming service. And between discover weekly, dj, curated playlists, my own playlists and user-created playlists there are significantly more ways to find the music you want, and not the bullshit non-working search that Youtube has.
> Spotify reported that it had 9,400 employees at the end of the third quarter of 2023. It had already cut back employee numbers by 6% in January and by a further 2% in June.
I wonder what they were all doing. Their special apps, like the iWatch, are below par and they are pretty much the last service that doesn't offer HQ audio. AI does most of the editorial playlist generation. What are nearly 10K people doing?
AFAIK, it's not actually Electron, but their own tooling using Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). Also AFAIK, they came up with their solution for this before Electron was even a thing (so before Atom the code editor, which Electron came from).
Reminds of the quote attributed to Naval Ravikant (paraphrased):
You have one person running the website. They leave and, of course, you need two people to replace that one person. Then, eventually, one of them leaves, you need two people to replace them etc. This brings you to a scenario where you have 5,000 people maintaining the website and changes take years.
Probably just a fraction of employees are doing software, the bulk of the work is managing contracts, labels, legal compliance in 250 countries, marketing, administration, etc.
Spotify reported that it had 9,400 employees at the end of the third quarter of 2023. It had already cut back employee numbers by 6% in January and by a further 2% in June.
This isn't about rising costs though, this is about the labels and shareholders being greedy and wanting an even bigger piece of the cake that is already massive.
Meanwhile artists are getting paid next to nothing and now even workers are getting the short end of the stick.
That isn't what the inflation number means. An inflation rate of 0% means prices stop going up and stay at their current level, not that prices go down. Prices going down would be deflation, and that almost certainly won't happen.
I see this response a lot on these threads. Why is it so hard to accept that two digit inflation over the past couple of years and interest rates well above 5% could be a major factor?
Well how about thinking stakeholders first and shareholders second?
Firing your employees because you are incompetent leadership and management without good foresight should result in letting you go.
Why the high compensation for leadership when it doesn‘t know what it does?
Braun didn‘t get the design leader in the past because they threw out their team, they got there because they kept the team together. The more you learn the better for the company.
This goes for all tech related job cutting in the last months.
Tech is disproportionately affected by rate changes (both inflation and loans/bonds), as it's the highest growth sector. High growth businesses are investing heavily in infrastructure and as such are also highly leveraged.
Who planed and executed a strategy like this and why isn‘t it done in a way to not get as much employees which would lead into them getting laid off?
Why getting cheap money without taking into account that the situation is different in 5 years?
I couldn’t care less that growth businesses run into this situation. Then don‘t grow it so fast!
People are getting fired across so many businesses. It appears unlikely they will get another job soon. The situation leads to health problems and has ramifications for people. Fucking management can do whatever they want. They still get highly compensated.
What? I addressed your comment. I'll make it simpler: you are spouting nonsense.
Spotify didn't "plan and execute" anything. The current situation was brought on by 2 decades of quantitative easing and then multiple black swan events and even more cash injection until it all came crumbling down. The amount of blame you place on the board of a single company to combat what is essentially a global crisis brought on by actions taken by world governments is extremely naive. Spotify isn't alone in this. Nearly every big tech company has had layoffs and I don't think we're anywhere close to being done yet. I hear rumors more are coming for mamaa.
There are large forces that affect our lives that are beyond our control which cause us anxiety. We can deal with this in different ways; religion, government, or employers are all authorities who we may believe can help us through times of need (our healthcare, for some of us our literal ability to continue living, is tied up in our employment, at least in the US). It’s only natural that we run into problems when our bulwark against the uncertainties of the world is taken away. And then tie up the prestige of working for FAANG and the identity that comes with it, to learn that perhaps you weren’t so special; you were just caught up in a ZIRP phenomenon - it can be hard for an individual to take.
I don't disagree, but we all need to strive to do better. Pleading with perceived corporate overloads to fix problems they are simply victims of themselves isn't helping anything. I'm seeing this trend more and more where people want to blame ceos like they have some magical wand to fix the worlds problems. That's not how things work.
If we want to look for solutions, we should look at the 20 years of stimulus which go us here and question why this was happening and what we should have been doing about it. But, alas, few were complaining when they were able to get 500k loans with sub 3 interest rates...
How do things work? From what I can tell (speaking as an American), we do seem to have imbued corporate leaders with a reverence classically reserved for religious leaders. And who else are we supposed to look to? God is dead, and 40-odd years of starve the beast has left the government with seemingly few policy tools to enact change; though as you note they can still change interest rates and print money.
Hopefully someone will come along and save us, but it's hard to imagine who.
The government printed the money. They are the issue. Corporations compete with each other for survival, they cannot afford to be altruistic and expecting them to be is totally naive
Given that they are responsible for providing (and I suppose delivering as well) the healthcare of a majority of Americans, it seems problematic that corporations are nihilistic profit-maximizing machines though, doesn't it? I mean, I'm pretty sure we're all just boned at this point, but obviously I'm not much of an optimist. Judging by the declines in birthrates though, it seems like that's more or less what others are coming to conclude.
I‘m no business major, I have no clue how to handle a company on a stock market. But the results I see is that leadership took steps that let into people loosing their jobs. Why are shareholders and management so important and employees at the branches are not? Everyone in that chain should be taken into account.
Shareholders have had a poor investment so they do share in the failure. But the way a business works is shareholders vote for a board and the board installs management. This management then installs leaders/managers to oversee the different components of the business.
These people are the business and are often compensated in large part with meaningful equity. Everyone else (middle managers and contributors) are not the business - they just work for it. They are mainly compensated with a salary and are called employees. They are hired to complete tasks for the managers.
The managers will increase and decrease the number of employees based on the CEOs and other managers plan which the board approves. Plans often have certain assumptions that everyone (managers, not employees) agrees on and sometimes it doesn’t pan out so they have to change the plan.
Sometimes the managers resign or are fired when the plan fails and it was their fault. Other times they aren’t because it wasn’t something they could avoid (economic downturn, rise in rates, inflation, etc) or other reasons (they could be large shareholders themselves).
Just a nitpick, but this isn't the traditional definition of "riskless", which would be Treasuries. I believe the S&P 500 experiences an average drawdown of 14% in any given year, so it's hardly without risk.
You could more accurately say that SPOT has been underperforming "the market", "equities", or "beta".
I can’t find any references for when the 3 major labels held significant stakes in Spotify. Only Sony did with 5.7% at the time they went public, according to the principal shareholders section:
> This isn't about rising costs though, this is about the labels and shareholders being greedy and wanting an even bigger piece of the cake that is already massive.
Source? Because losing money every year does not seem sustainable.
"The video starts by talking about how Spotify has become the dominant force in the music industry. In 2018, Spotify had over 200 million users and was paying out over $5 billion in royalties to artists. However, the video also points out that Spotify is not a very profitable company. In fact, Spotify has lost money every year since it was founded in 2006.
So, how does Spotify make money? The answer is that Spotify makes money by selling advertising. In 2018, Spotify generated over $1.2 billion in advertising revenue. This means that Spotify is essentially a media company that just happens to also offer music streaming.
The video also discusses the impact of streaming on artists. On the one hand, streaming has made it easier for people to discover new music. This can be a good thing for artists, as it can help them to reach a wider audience. On the other hand, streaming has also led to a decline in album sales. This is because people are no longer willing to pay $10 or $20 for an album when they can stream it for free on Spotify.
As a result of this, many artists are now struggling to make a living from their music. In fact, a study by the Berklee College of Music found that the median income for a full-time musician in the United States is just $20,000 per year.
So, what does the future hold for the music industry? The video argues that the music industry is in a state of flux. It is unclear how artists will be able to make a living in the future, and it is also unclear how Spotify will be able to continue to grow its business."
"Spotify is essentially a media company" - they are definitely still a music streaming company with an ad-sponsored product-tier, even if the ad-sponsored tier is the most popular or most profitable. Also, when you have an ad-sponsored tier you are not streaming for free - you are paying by selling your attention, it's just that the resulting cash price of the subscription is opaque to the user.
This differs from e.g. Google that runs a large ad platform used not only by several of their own services, but also external products and services (other websites and apps).
Unfortunately, that's an example of where A.I. didn't do a good job of extracting the key thesis of Benn Jordan's argument. Arguably, Benn Jordan himself didn't make it easy for the automatic semantic algorithm to summarize his main point because he's not stating it clearly enough and sprinkles in tangents throughout the presentation.
Basically, he says "Spotify Will Fail" because they created a flawed and unsustainable economic structure which happened because it signed lopsided licensing deals with the Big 3 Labels that leaves no significant money for smaller artists trying to make a living. Spotify had to "overpay" for the Big Labels song catalog to attract a large userbase so its current financial history has been a roundabout funneling of VC investment money (and most subscribers' money) into the Big 3 Labels rather than create a sustainable streaming business where more musicians can share in the pie.
The random sentences extracted by Bard AI hide Benn's core thesis.
The other sentences not extracted are the ones that support Benn's main argument: (1) the lopsided Sony licensing deal example, (2) the various other examples of VC money spent on subsidizing fundamentally unprofitable businesses structures for participants (Uber, $9.99 unlimited movies at theaters, etc).
I didn't watch either, but judging from the comments, it's the usual story: they are completely beholden to record companies, who own rights to nearly all of their catalog. Thus most of their revenue goes straight back out the door as royalties. Moreover, the recording companies can raise the rates pretty much at-will, which apparently they have done upon seeing Spotify starting to make a bit more money.
That is why Spotify are desperately trying to produce their own content, most notably in the podcast space, and I suspect why they also recently branched out into audiobooks, as every hour spent listening to an audiobook displaces a dozen or so royalty-generating song plays.
I'm surprised Spotify wouldn't take this to the next step and, borrowing a page from the old industrialists, try to vertically integrate and start their own music label and talent scouting arm.
You would think they could pull a "Netflix and House of Cards" to use all of their play data to find exactly which kind of niche singer/songwriter people would want to hear. They could then use their reach + algorithms to float their artists into people's "discover new" playlists.
> I'm surprised Spotify wouldn't take this to the next step and, borrowing a page from the old industrialists, try to vertically integrate and start their own music label and talent scouting arm.
Probably because music is spread quite far and the labels have a tight grip on the industry. If you want to have the music most people listen to, you need to have the top talent. Also, music is not as fungible as music is - if Spotify is lacking popular music, people are going to be discontent, use less playlists and use Spotify less in return.
> You would think they could pull a "Netflix and House of Cards" to use all of their play data to find exactly which kind of niche singer/songwriter people would want to hear.
I'm not sure this is working that well for Netflix. It has lot of pressure with competing streaming services that market their exclusives and their library is pretty lacking, compared to a few years ago.
House of Cards was a home run. It was the nudge that made me breakdown and sign up for Netflix streaming after they split it off from DVDs. But these days, Netflix is probably the service that is closest to me pulling the plug. It's relatively pricey and there isn't a lot that I really want to see on it.
They tried with podcasts. Several podcasters jumped on the chance to trade exposure for a nice big check. Don't know if it worked out for Spotify or not though.
And not make their music available on CD/digital download? Taylor Swift is not going to agree to make her music only available on Spotify. That would be insane. Some small act might. In which case no one would care.
Agreed. I mentioned this is another thread - they need to vertically integrate music. They have all the leverage as the distribution channel and controller of algorithms. To start they’d probably want to buy a label or pay money existing labels can’t afford for the people that can find and attract top talent.
In essence use their size to pay more than record labels and eventually acquire them.
Also why they are pushing so hard for getting people outside their playlist with "jams" "radio" and the automatically enabled "similar content" features, so they can fill play time with low royalty music.
They're trying to be an aggregator but the record companies know this and they're businesses, not consumers, so they just put up an old fashioned cartel against the aggregator.
The author of the video argues that Spotify will ultimately fail due to the high cost of membership, the fact that streaming services pay independent musicians less than traditional music platforms, and the company's neglect of its only asset - its artists.
00:00:00 The author of the video argues that Spotify will ultimately fail because of the high cost of membership and the fact that streaming services pay independent musicians less than traditional music platforms.
00:05:00 The author of the video makes the case that Spotify will eventually fail because of its business model, which relies on rapid growth and unsustainable levels of value in the music industry. He argues that if Spotify's independent musicians were paid more fairly, the platform would be unable to survive.
00:10:00 The author of the video argues that Spotify will eventually fail due to the company's neglect of its only asset - its artists. The author believes that this neglect will lead to the eventual collapse of the streaming music industry as a whole. However, he also believes that this collapse will be hastened by the fact that for-profit companies are required to eventually pay their investors as little as possible.
00:15:00 The author of this video argues that streaming services like Spotify will ultimately fail because they rely on artificial scarcity (i.e. the notion that there are not enough songs available to listen to on the platform). They suggest that instead of using streaming services, musicians should focus on releasing their music on their own platforms, such as Bandcamp or their own website.
They are likely not charging enough for their costs. A lot of unsustainable businesses are like that. Users love it because of the low prices and high perceived value - think Uber.
Spotify basically started as a P2P Grooveshark that promised to pay royalties. Now they are a CDN that pays royalties. The problem is that they refuse to accept the reality that there is an end to growth.
They have opportunities to leverage their massive footprint by vertically integrating. They could begin to acquire talent and exclusively release their music and prioritize it in their algorithms or forge agreements with existing labels that create this sort of arrangement. They would then have leverage to negotiate better deals with 3rd party rights holders.
In essence a type of payola since they have a lot of sway in picking winners and losers. They sort of tried this with podcasts but I’m not sure those move needles like music can.
So yeah their current model may be limited but they have a lot to work with.
They are certainly doing that. But that is only a solution to the select few who are chosen to be vertically integrated with!
They have also vertically integrated in the opposite direction: by making deals with large media corporations, and also by implementing DRM (to appease those media corporations).
So at this point, there isn't much vertical integration left to be had. Any more deals with individual artists (or labels) would really just be horizontal integration.
> So yeah their current model may be limited but they have a lot to work with.
That limit is practically the entire worldwide music industry. They are very close to that limit, and seem utterly ignorant about it.
An alternative viewpoint: Their costs are too high for what they can reasonably charge. Hence the layoffs. They could probably cut half of their workforce.
Page 1, the R&D, sales and marketing, and general and administrative expenses are probably almost all payroll expenses. And they are basically equal to or exceeding gross profit, which means payroll is a huge expense.
Why are you comparing it to their gross profit and not to the rest of their costs which is what I said?
Ultimately Spotify's staff costs are significant because they were throwing people at trying to make the podcasting business work, which was a failed bet but they need to do.
The main issue though is that buying licenses to music is just too expensive for the amount of money they charge, and they need to license less stuff or charge more money.
Because of the expenses Spotify can control, payroll is (seemingly) its biggest one. Spotify is never going to be able to reduce the proportion paid to the music owners.
They have 9500 employees. Just salaries alone at a very conservative (for american standards) 75000$ average make up 700 million dollars a year, excluding healthcare and other expenses. Payroll is definitely a huge cost.
Spotify is a public for-profit company with shareholders, the purpose of their organization is not to make profit so they can redistribute it, but to increase the share value as much as possible in order for the shareholders to benefit. Sometimes that means that they need to increase profits, but not always, there are other ways to increase the share value besides profits.
"Hype" is a common way for "modern" companies to drive up share price, see TSLA for a good example of that. Greenwashing is another, not as common approach.
Companies can do whatever they want, it does not mean it will work. No company’s share price is going to up for years and years because of “hype”. And the hype is for future profits anyway.
The point is Tesla earns a lot of money, and has a good, proven trajectory.
Close enough for the purposes of this conversation. Point is, they earn more money than they spend, the gap between those is growing. And they did it in a high barrier to entry business.
Counterpoint: almost no one I know uses it. It was fun at first but became boring fast, a bit like Netflix. If I want to listen to music I use youtube.
Paerhaps in your circle of friends. But spotify is not that popular. I wouldn't be surprised if their numbers of users are doctored. I know travel sites count the number of devices used by the same user as distinct users. One reached a number higher than the actual world population, people starting asking questions, and then they clarified it. It helps with marketing when you create the impression that "everyone uses it". For instance Threads has more users than OpenAI's chat bots but people think there are more users of the latter due to marketing. Spotify claims to have 226 million subscribers - as many as there are yahoo users. Yet I guarantee you that Yahoo is not popular. And neither is Spotify.
The penetration rate is pretty obvious when you look at social media at this time of year. Everyone has posts of their Spotify Wrapped. 226 million doesn't seem that high when it's the only music streaming service that most people in Europe are even aware of.
Did someone check with _everyone_? It feels like when people make such statments they refer to their own bubble. "It is known" is not a valid argument.
This is like the HN trope of “nobody uses Facebook / Instagram / [other social media product] anyway.”
These services are global with hundreds of millions of users or more. There’s nothing useful to be extrapolated from the usage patterns of yourself and a handful of friends.
(Personally I only listen to Amiga MODs and watch 8mm home movies of my mother while whistling the theme from “Psycho”.)
Counter-Counterpoint: I got two teens in (American public) high school - they claim "everyone" uses Spotify and grumble about our YouTube Music/Premium subscription. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I am a cynic here but part of me feels that with such low interest rates for so long, a lot of companies in tech could ignore profitability so long as they were hitting that MAU and related targets.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 700 ms ] thread> I have made the difficult decision to reduce our total headcount by approximately 17% across the company.
I think this was the first corporate notice about layoffs that didn't read like absolute bullshit.
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).
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.
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
"I don't recall saying good luck"
"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.
Damn, that's every job I've ever had.
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
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.
The inefficiency of Google always amazes me.
It's the kind of people they attract. IBM types...
As long as they have the cheat code for unlimited free money(ads) they can be as inefficient as they want.
So you know, the standard Google experience.
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.
I'm sure when they migrated users to YouTube Music they got rid of the special deal.
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.
But Google could easily do a Google and sabotage the product at some point.
Spotify is actually trying to make money. If the goal of running Spotify was to get everyone to listen to the CEO's crappy garage band, maybe then it would be a valid comparison.
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.
I still wouldn't use it, but I am surprised that I never knew of this.
So pretty much everywhere.
PS. Spotify had already two layoffs, once 6% in Jan 2023 and 2% in June. This combined seems like a 25% ish cut.
Can't cut costs to profitability if you are cutting revenue faster than costs.
- 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.
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.
I don't think you know what you're talking about...
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.
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.
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...
Just because they are "interesting" they should not get a free promo.
>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.
Reducing his audience, censoring his most controversial past episodes and preventing certain conversations from happening in front of his large audience in future?
In this incredibly divided world, politics has started to come before profit.
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...
Not that I disagree with you.
[1]https://www.playstation.com/en-us/legal/psvideocontent/?et_r...
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.
Probably some motivated forgetfulness on my part, because I'm just so glad that their attempts to bind podcasts exclusively to their platform seem to be failing/diminishing.
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.
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...
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.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SPOT/holders/
Any ownership by the record labels must be less than 1%.
"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.
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.
Your math doesn't have to work out, even if it's solid.
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.
And it's so small, too.
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...
200 developers @ $150k a year = $30M
$200M/$30M = 6.5 years
I don't know their financials, but it seems quite unlikely that a single podcast would be worth that valuation.
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...
Has this ever been confirmed by Spotify?
> 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
I think Rogan was paid a ridiculous amount of money due to fantasies of some executives, maybe influenced by bad politics or something.
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?
A lot of the smaller players have dropped out of this space, which might be a hint as to why Spotify is leaning in to the podcasts: maybe it’s hard to be independent here with Amazon, Apple, and Google being willing to not make much money on this as they build their moats.
Good for you, I'm sure that made a huge impact.
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.
Podcast are cheaper to produce and requires no record label sharing the profits with Spotify.
That's, AIUI, the theory. Whether it works in practice is another story.
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...
or, otherwise said: "we fired you to make our bottom line look nicer"
Businesses need to be able to grow and shrink. Otherwise we just end up with "too big to fail".
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.
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.
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.
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.
Spotify is one of the few companies that raises prices every year but somehow get further away from making a profit.
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.
"We will start with a baseline for all employees, with the average employee receiving approximately five months of severance."
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.
Plus internal tools will probably be a major thing too.
Edit: By proprietary I mean - owned by Spotify.
It would be pointless for them to stay an passive background app. Might as well shutdown the company and cut the losses.
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?
Can you describe the criteria ?
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.
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.
Netflix claimed there was statistical justification for the change, but my most charitable interpretation is that their goals don't align with mine.
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.
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.
Again, sounds like I'm some secret corporate shill or something but I truly am just genuinely appreciative of the service.
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.
Can you elaborate? Seriously curious how that exactly would look like.
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.
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).
It's terrible, because i love playing guitar, and they are screwing with the english language as normal people use it.
> 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-...
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?
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?
But as soon as RIF becomes widely understood, with all the negative connotations of layoffs, a new term will be need for some other nuanced reason.
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.
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.
Announced now, people can at least try to scale back Christmas and NYE plans if necessary.
> 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
How depressing.
While overall there will still be more jobs than qualified people to fill them. Let's not pretend like the employee market is full of people who've just been laid off from very reputable companies.
If they were worried about efficiency, they would not have grossly over hired during covid. That's why we need unions.
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.
In Europe even fast food workers or servers/waiters are paid a reasonable salary and have vacation days and their medical costs covered by their employer. Also, labor laws in Europe are much stricter and it's harder for a company to fire their workers so easily. Just see what the unionized Tesla workers are doing in Sweden. In terms of worker rights and job security, US simply doesn't compare to Europe.
It's good that at the very least the laid off workers in Sweden will get unemployment benefits from the government, in addition to the severance Spotify pays them. I believe it's something that amounts to monthly payments equal to 70-80% of their salary for at least 400 days. That, hopefully, will ensure that they have plenty of time and opportunity to find something else.
- 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 :)
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.
Seems like their headline gambles didn't work but googling suggests that the podcast listener market increased 10% in the last year so I think they'll probably try again.
I suspect this means that Spotify subscribers are listening to plenty of podcasts, but perhaps podcasts failed to bring new listeners into Spotify.
I'd say that gamble in particular worked. Not so sure others will though, audio books feels like it will be a dud.
Podcasting has also been called the slowest growing new medium in the history of new media. I can't imagine it's earning its keep, relative to those big initial payouts. Meanwhile, the shows that are brought into subscription-only world systematically fail to attract new listeners; it is hard to use podcast exclusives to grow market share. Especially the talking head variety, which exist in abundance outside the pay wall.
Will it pay off? Probably not. But is 25% a big share? Yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Music
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Play_Music
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify
The problem for Spotify is that they need a far bigger share of the market to be able to have negotiating power against the 3 record labels that they have to buy the music from. Apple/Alphabet/Amazon do not care as much because re-selling the music at cost or even as a loss leader is not a big deal to them.
But I agree that podcastings growth has been very slow. I think that there are a lot of factors influencing that. The biggest in my opinion is that listening to a podcast is more intimate than any other media (including broadcast radio) and that factor both slows uptake and decreases churn. Not a marketer though so just making that up.
I still think it was not a smart move...
Its like that blue haired streamer going from twitch to what ever the msft clone of it was.
Yes Spotify is super popular but I hear more and more people moving away from it to for example apple music or other services.
They don't focus on the core anymore that much.
For example they are super late on the lossless audio train.
Yes you can hear a difference from spotify and apple music. I tested it with all my colleagues in the office. You can clearly hear that apple music or tidal sounds better then the spotify versions.
And for those lossless is a massive difference.
Especially the ones with the Dolby Atmos (Spatial Audio) mixes. Even if you don’t have super high-res headphones, the difference in dynamic range is pretty obvious, and it makes songs just feel more alive.
I don’t have any stats to back this up but it seems that Apple Music has at least managed to somewhat buck the trend of the “loudness wars” with the masters they use. I wonder if this is actually published or written about anywhere…
I was once remaking some hiphop beats from there samples and you can hear the difference even more when you have a remade beat (its not 100% the same) you can hear what the compression has done to the sample.
I will venture that most people don't notice or care.
I recently ditched both Apple Music and Spotify and am using Youtube Music, which comes with Youtube Premium.
Sony xm4 as headphones.
Fwiw there is not a single scientific listening test ever where participants were able to tell the difference between high bitrate mp3 and wav. Not even in perfect studio conditions.
How much audience did they fail to convert? How much harder did that make building momentum?
9000 employees and couldn’t get playback to work…
If cutting those 1500 jobs would put Spotify in serious harm (i.e. devs, licensing, IT security), they wouldn't let any of them go. But they do. So they are either very foolish OR they know something(s) we don't.
If an individual took advantage of cheap credit to buy a car & flogged it while being underwater on the loan shortly after, we'd rightly judge it as a financial mistake. When a CEO does it with people's livelihoods and social circles at stake, it's applauded.
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.
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%"?
Lazy hyperbole and picked pareto 80%. Not remotely well calculated remark. Should have constrained comment to engineer/design team.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why should someone walk around afraid of being seen associating with Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson? They're certainly not promoting Jewish genocide, unlike others.
I'm ready for the downvotes.
If the image of the most popular podcast causes drama then it's those people who are on the fringe.
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.
That's not the right comparison.
You don't buy the OS for entertainment recommendations and listening/viewing/playing/reading.
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
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.
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.
https://artists.spotify.com/en/showcase
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.
You could do this, but I think the profile pictures would look better with rounded edges.
Everyone back then used to ask me the same question: Why does groupon have 500 ppl, isnt' it just a wordpress site.
Chicago has been a big centre for developers for finance companies for a long time. Hedge Funds, Market Makers, Asset Managers etc.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ken-griffin-citadel-moving-h...
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!
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.
I once walked out of an improv class (on company time)
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...
It's a media player with a CDN. They should have at most 100 engineers.
Even if you narrow down to focusing on just one of those like the desktop app. There are so many sub-features. Playlist management, playback management, search, audiobooks, podcasts, merch, event ticketing, groups, collaborative playlists, local files, upsells from free to paid, notifications. I could go on.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's far from a monopoly...
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TME/tencent-music-...
I presume they don’t have to pay rent to a few big copyright holders like Spotify does.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My twitter feed is literally a ghost town
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.
I see this type of hyperbole twice a week on HN and it's getting really boring.
Otherwise, the service is generally reliable.
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.
Hasnt this been done to death on hackernews ( and elsewhere) . why do we keep beating this dead horse
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I see it not as "name-calling". But if this is against whatever the powers that be see as the "spirit of the site", I shall remain silent.
Back to lurking it is.
It just leads to a downward spiral and (eventually) scorched earth, and none of that is what we're here for. We want curious conversation and interesting threads.
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.
My usual yardstick is Apollo programme development team size: about 600 developers. Relatively few tasks are substantially more challenging than writing code that would get people to the Moon and back. There have to be some that are as hard or harder naturally. But when you see a commercial company that has an order of magnitude or two more devs than that, using modern tooling and conveniences, it's hard to fathom.
And when it comes to product development teams, 3 is pretty minimal. I'm sure most teams have more people than that. I'm simply pointing out that there are a lot of corners of functionality within the platform and one way you can press the gas pedal to accelerate your roadmap is fragmenting areas of concern and forming teams around those fragments. If the conditions for making those bets change, you undo that by consolidating teams, lengthening roadmaps, and downsizing staff (in some order).
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.
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.
They aren't a good idea. Almost always. For example, "lets put podcasts in spotify". Not a single person I know wanted podcasts in spotify.
It might not be a good idea for you, or for me, but there's value on providing it. The churn from adding podcasts was probably low enough to make it worthwhile as a business.
Exclusive podcasts on the other hand seem to have backfired immensely.
At some scales of business, spending a lot more to get incremental gains can be worth it.
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.
I am sure curl does too, with one guy running it. Spotify is not a telephone company. The engineering work hardly scale with the amount of users. There should be a need for some extra sales staff, lawyers and translators per market.
Their engineer staff numbers are just silly.
https://spotifystudios.com/
All management hates unions, and especially the management of SV companies. They will do everything to crush it. So you either do it fast or lose employees as the management will attack first.
9000 employees. My gods.
What are all these people doing?!
I'm surprised people don't realize this, especially on hackernews.
This seems to be some megatrend with the big tech companies. Hire on ~10k staff, ignore your core features, ???, profit.
I can't imagine the whole thing can't be done with between 30 to 50 engineers in total.
And everyone else, what do they do? Cold calls to the entire planet to go subscribe, or what? Also alright, some lawyers and "compliance" people, financiers, marketers,...
Don't know. I'd struggle to fill a roster of 200 people for Spotify.
> Clearly not working on the core functionality of the app - heh.
Sadly, yes. That they become so tone-deaf is something I'll never condone though I do understand why it's happening (or so I think: is it the gobs of money that make people comfortable and disconnected from the bread and butter of the company?)
How WhatsApp served 1 billion users with only 50 engineers. https://blog.quastor.org/p/whatsapp-scaled-1-billion-users-5...
edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28985169
Some of these are a team per region, some are a team per platform, some are entire divisions
At least 10x that, easily. In a very optimistic scenario.
The back-office part is much bigger than people think (bands management, content management, rights management, recommendations, etc).
Then you have the services like Auth, streaming, encoding, managing CDNs, caching, etc.
I used to think that, tech companies could do with like what 200 people max, but after working on few places for a while now, I am no longer surprised, specially when your service spans the globe(or even multiple countries or continents), you really need a huge team to keep troubles out and the wheels going.
Obviously I am not well-versed in all the legal requirements and many other commercial aspects, but to me 9000 is quite insane and surely can be optimized away.
And apparently Spotify agrees.
Because it's like a cliché example of an engineer with the view that some relatively successful real-world product—that they have no real insight into—is far easier to implement than the people who _are_ familiar with it have. You see this literally all the time, to the extent that it's become a meme, and it's hard to believe anybody would make that argument seriously.
Spotify might have too many engineers on-staff; reducing the service to "moving between 1MB to 20MB files from a CDN to user's devices" is a flatly uncurious approach to understanding what engineering challenges they might face or if that's really the case. It's a service that _adds_ 100k songs a day, for goodness sake.
Mobile (iOS, Android), web, vehicle native integrations (Tesla, Volvo, VW, BMW, Audi, Ford), gaming (Xbox, Switch, PS4, PS5), desktop (Mac, Windows, Linux, Chromebook) and voice assistants (Alexa, Google).
Maintaining that variety of front ends must be very labour intensive.
TVs, Wifi connected speakers, home theater systems, Chromecast etc.
A lot of the external frontends are also not made by spotify themselves, but implemented by the manufacturer through Spotify's SDK.
You still want a bunch of dedicated staff to support all that, but it's not as dramatic as it could be.
Is it because you've never worked at a non-startup or how come you have that opinion? Like, you just have no idea what's required/useful and you can't even imagine it?
I'd love to hear how you split the workload between these 5 backenders.
Though I have only once worked in a huge corporation (and I couldn't understand what did they need all the people for either).
I was almost always working in smaller tight-knit teams that got a LOT of stuff done (too much contracting for my now 40+ y/o self).
So I err on the side of "be efficient" and that's not even for the purposes of cost efficiency. It's more about being able to iterate with a reasonable speed. My observations from my career support what Bill Gates and others said i.e. that the productivity of a tech team starts to decline when it goes beyond 7 people. Generalization, sure, but it's very often true.
As for the 5 backenders thing, OK, my perspective might have been too narrow i.e. "writing code to move bytes from our servers to CDNs to user's devices can't be that hard" and I mostly stand behind it. Sure you might need much more devs to author complex login systems, SSO and such (if you even need it) but again, after the product somewhat stabilizes, how much backenders do you really need?
I am also interested in your opinion. My entire career has been a proof that small and tight-knit teams get sh1t done and everyone else drowns in bureaucracy.
I absolutely, 100%, agree that a small and focused team is the best way to get shit done, but for a large company the size of Spotify the amount of work is absolutely massive. I wouldn't be surprised at all if many teams at Spotify are small and tight-knit and doing great work at delivering kick-ass anti-fraud systems or moderation software to detect and report child porn etc.
Not to mention the obvious thing where the higher your revenue, the less percentual impact each employee needs to have to more than pay for themselves. While you might think it's ridiculous to have a full team dedicated solely to the main marketing page, that could be extremely worth it if that team increases conversion by 10%, as an example.
But as another commenter pointed out -- it's actually 13900 people.
Again, everything you say it's true but I am finding it hard to imagine the scale and the degree of the problems that mandate ~14k people. Sure, 1000. Maybe 2500.
But 13900?
So Spotify should bring you in as the CTO, right? How can you make such a confident claim that you know better how to run the company that has beat the daylights out of every other music streaming platforms (including Google, Amazon, and Apple)?
Over the last 12 months, headcount has risen dramatically within Sales (+32%), Arts & Design (+19%), and Business Development (+21%). In comparison, Engineering has seen just a 2% rise, Media and Comms at 0%, and marketing at +10%.
If I had to guess, lots of these layoffs will begin to affect their headcounts within these functions that have experienced rapid year-on-year growth, and affect their Engineering function (despite being their largest) proportionally less than these other functions.
I would be interested in how you came to your conclusion of needing only 200 employees for a company of this scale? Any company of spotify's scale will have entire functions that will be distributed globally and working on a variety of projects or products. For example, Spotify has almost 400 data scientists. Off the top of my head, I can't fathom what I would have 400 data scientists working on, but I can easily believe that a company with over $12bn in revenue and 574 million listeners this year could find a use for them.
On top of that, the company wants to innovate and probably has teams working on hardware and whatnot.
Whether it’s efficient is not clear, but most people there probably work hard on their particular daily grind.
They don't have 9000 developers, they have 9000 employees.
It’s a LOT of humans for streaming music service.
A lot of the main tech achievements are great geek talking points but not where labor is really concentrated.
Humans are vain and shallow, that should probably one of the core things drilled into geek skulls.
This comparison is fundamentally dumb. What's next, asking why you need hundreds of thousands of employees to run worldwide store business and comparing it to Voyager program?
Music licensing, streaming and revenue sharing is hardly a “go to the moon in the 60s” complexity problem. And having a lot of end users doesn’t mean you need massive employee head counts in digital service delivery, it just means you have a lot of customers and need to build your digital delivery systems to handle a larger scale which is generally expressed as a modest pressure on engineering groups to build most scalable systems and not a rocket science level problem.
The high head counts are always present at the end of boom cycles, but a LOT of what companies are doing at the end of these cycles is simply busywork.
The busywork problem exists because managers equate business with productivity, and their organizations reflect that.
The perception is not just that a busy worker is engaged and making an effort, but even that their industriousness gives them a higher value than their less busy colleagues. But really only a relatively small number of employees do the vast majority of the work (Pareto principle). The whole corporate management theory sets up a dynamic in which two office workers completing identical tasks can be judged on their busyness, rather than their results. Who appears to be more engaged: the busy worker who skips lunch to get things finished, or the efficient worker who finishes early and uses the time saved to buy groceries online?
This, when applied at scale, leads to highly staffed organizations with a LOT of busy people who don’t really do that much compared to their potential for output.
If you don’t see the metaphor between a large engineering project and an engineering organization that seems over staffed, that’s fine. But do try to have the social grace to not call people dumb. There is just no call for insults here.
Spotify's work might not be getting people alive to the Moon with 1960s tech, but there is A LOT of it since they need to cover so much more.
Rest of your post is pretty much bloviating with assumptions you have no grounds for - not to mention your almost insulting minimization of work that's not TrueEngineeringWorkForMoon(tm).
I've worked in streaming industry and I can tell you that there is a stupid amount of work getting all the licenses and content in order across all the nations that Spotify is present it. You can call it "busywork", but it's no more busywork than jockeying JavaScript to make your CI happy. It's critical for company operations - Spotify lives and dies on amount of content they have, the speed they get new content and the ability to payout artists across the world for their content. Not to mention take money from people across the world.
It's outright hillarious how everyone here underestimates a problem like "we need to legally pay out money in Germany to Rammstein for a song", it's like watching HBO's Sillicon Valley in real life.
Implying that “Jockeying JavaScript” isn’t real enough engineering work is also a look.
Arguing that engineering projects of scale can’t be compared because one can’t tell the difference between volume and complexity is rough conversation.
The idea that engineering on large technical projects can’t be compared across industries or eras isn’t true in an objective sense either.
Not super happy I took the time to reply to you and got told I was to get called blovating. That’s unkind.
That while stating that “everyone on HN underestimates things” and doesn’t understand how hard problems like paying someone for streaming actually is exactly the kind of nonsensical thinking that is building these large headcount companies.
Your argument is that “global payments are harder than people realize.” But it’s simply not true. They are profoundly easier than they have ever been in history and people on hacker news are many of the very people creating those payment rails.
So I think calling their opinions “hilarious” while insulting the entire community and the person you’re talking to… it’s not… great. Calling it a “real life” Silicon Valley kinda is though, because well, it kind of literally is. This is the website of the most successful Silicon Valley incubator.
I come on here to learn and have positive interactions with people, grow intellectually and this isn’t quite what I am looking for. Thanks for your interaction though. Have a great day.
Yes, if they were at the cutting edge on every platform and constantly adding innovative new features, that could certainly explain 500 of the 9000 employees.
But that still leaves 8,500 employees unexplained.
Between that and the ability to just contract local lawyers, 45 to (realistically closer to) 90 employees per (relevant) country is still a lot.
Also, spotify outsourced 90% of their support to their community (designated "star" members). There's no hotline either, so no call centres to run, or anything else personnel intensive. (And you'd outsource that anyway, realistically.)
Ensuring Spotify can smoothly operate globally
You are assuming that Spotify is just the consumer facing app, but it's not. It's far more.
You've got all the bits of Spotify you don't see. Like:
* Apps and interfaces for labels to ingest their music
* Reporting and billing so all those labels get paid
* An ad platform to service free-tier users
* Embedded systems. Did you know Spotify has a commercial hardware division to integrate Spotify onto smart speakers and devices?
The surface is huge.
These are probably not all devs/engineers. Usually, selling services/products in multiple countries mean, dedicated legal, HR, accounting replicated in nearly every location where no common treaty exists, and management in large tech tends to have too many levels and adds up quickly as well.
I hate Xitter like the next guy, but if there is one thing Musk made right is to show you can axe most of the staff of an established platform and you can still have a running global scale operation (ignoring some early downtimes/hiccups and all other, khm, content-related issues). It seems currently they have around 600 full-time engineers.
Xitter is massively tanking as a company with massive revenue losses since that brilliant idea. Its example proves literally the opposite of what you're claiming - after firings the company is in tailspin of financial losses.
Of course they could change the scheme to a more fair one (Spotify gets a fixed amount from your subscription and the rest is divided between artists you listened to in a given month) but the problem is the deal wouldn't be so advantageous to big studios. So basically everybody is subsidizing a few big guys who earn a lot.
When it comes to Spotify in particular, I use it almost daily and I can't say that I've noticed any new features in the past two-three years, other than some semi-confusing reshuffle of where stuff is listed on the home page. Feels like it is an app that is well and truly in maintenance mode - it just does what it says on the tin, with extremely good market penetration.
So genuine non-facetious question as an outsider, what are the people working on? Does it take this many people to operate an app on the scale of Spotify, are there lots of people developing new features that never make it into prod, or is it something else that I haven't thought about?
For comparison the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has around 7000 employees, and they develop and operate multiple Mars rovers, several space telescopes, a whole range satellites and space probes, etc.
Maybe that's a bad comparison, but if so, why?
Admittedly I pay for YouTube Premium which comes with YouTube Music, so I use that for music. YouTube is kind of an integral part of life I find, everybody uses it. It has so much useful content, it has educational content, product reviews, how to guides, and then of course all the entertainment content. So assuming that probably most people subscribe to YouTube Premium, why Spotify as well?
Where do people have all that time for listening to all those podcasts which Spotify buys to lurk people onto their platform? I don't even have time for Netflix, let alone listening to some podcasts. Time taken up by my work, then my hobby projects, playing sports, playing with my child and spending time with my wife, meeting friends and family on our weekends, going outdoors with the kids or just for us to do something in the real world, cooking fresh food every day, doing regular house work and so forth, where is the time left to binge watch one Netflix series after another or to listen to these podcasts?
Even when I was single and didn't have wife and child I didn't have time for these things. In fact I had even less time because I did even more sports, went clubbing, house parties, dating women, going abroad with friends, etc. was even more time consuming than having a stable family now.
This is not criticism, but genuinely asking, do people who subscribe to those services do anything else in their life or are they just transitioning from Spotify to work to Netflix to bed to Spotify to work to Netflix to bed to... ???
I don't listen to podcasts, but I know people listen to them in during their commute.
In fact, I am surprised someone with kids and little free time considers Youtube an integral part of life. I watch an average of 2 videos a week, usually skipping most of them. Mostly DIY guides.
Maybe I will subscribe once my kids are in age to watch educational videos, but even then, I am pretty sure I will prefer Curiosity Stream, which I trust waaay more than Youtube for kid-friendly content.
Nursery rhymes on YouTube Premium are a blessing. When we were trying to teach my daughter to eat solids we struggled until we played compilation videos of other babies eating really well and then my daughter started to try to copy them. This was a blessing for the first child who doesn't have an older sibling to copy from. So many other useful scenarios where YouTube really helps.
Then of course all the other content. I love watching people doing reviews of products. For example, last Black Friday we bought an Air Fryer and I wanted to know what is the practical difference between the Ninja Dual drawer and single large drawer with divider. Like I'm already sold on buying a Ninja, just need to know which model and those YouTube videos are fantastic to do this kind of research. Same thign when I bought an expensive coffee machine and the brand had 3 different models which were very similar but with minor crucial differences.
Then of course there are all the podcasts on YouTube as well. I mean if I wanted to listen to Joe Rogan there is no shortage of him on YouTube for instance.
I love that YouTube also has sooooooo much other amazing content. Only 5 days ago when I was cooking in the evening I was rewatching an entire Tennis match, one of the classics between Andy Murray and Roger Federer. It's all on YouTube in high-res. Where else do I get so much value for money? It's definitely integral to our life. YouTube has it all.
Plus the family sub for YT Premium is well worth it. But I do sub to Amazon Music not Spotify because of Alexa.
Because I don't listen to "educational content, product reviews, how to guides" all the time?
I listen to music, and at its core Spotify is still a music streaming service. And between discover weekly, dj, curated playlists, my own playlists and user-created playlists there are significantly more ways to find the music you want, and not the bullshit non-working search that Youtube has.
Why would you assume this?
imho, I'd pay extra for a good NATIVE spotify client for the mac
AFAIK, it's not actually Electron, but their own tooling using Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). Also AFAIK, they came up with their solution for this before Electron was even a thing (so before Atom the code editor, which Electron came from).
You have one person running the website. They leave and, of course, you need two people to replace that one person. Then, eventually, one of them leaves, you need two people to replace them etc. This brings you to a scenario where you have 5,000 people maintaining the website and changes take years.
Spotify reported that it had 9,400 employees at the end of the third quarter of 2023. It had already cut back employee numbers by 6% in January and by a further 2% in June.
Meanwhile artists are getting paid next to nothing and now even workers are getting the short end of the stick.
Edit: I misread the comment. I am aware of the difference between rates and absolutes.
Low inflation rate means stuff get more expensive slower. It's still getting more expensive.
https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/monetary-policy/the-inflation-...
Firing your employees because you are incompetent leadership and management without good foresight should result in letting you go.
Why the high compensation for leadership when it doesn‘t know what it does?
Braun didn‘t get the design leader in the past because they threw out their team, they got there because they kept the team together. The more you learn the better for the company.
This goes for all tech related job cutting in the last months.
Tech is disproportionately affected by rate changes (both inflation and loans/bonds), as it's the highest growth sector. High growth businesses are investing heavily in infrastructure and as such are also highly leveraged.
Who planed and executed a strategy like this and why isn‘t it done in a way to not get as much employees which would lead into them getting laid off?
Why getting cheap money without taking into account that the situation is different in 5 years?
I couldn’t care less that growth businesses run into this situation. Then don‘t grow it so fast!
People are getting fired across so many businesses. It appears unlikely they will get another job soon. The situation leads to health problems and has ramifications for people. Fucking management can do whatever they want. They still get highly compensated.
Spotify didn't "plan and execute" anything. The current situation was brought on by 2 decades of quantitative easing and then multiple black swan events and even more cash injection until it all came crumbling down. The amount of blame you place on the board of a single company to combat what is essentially a global crisis brought on by actions taken by world governments is extremely naive. Spotify isn't alone in this. Nearly every big tech company has had layoffs and I don't think we're anywhere close to being done yet. I hear rumors more are coming for mamaa.
If we want to look for solutions, we should look at the 20 years of stimulus which go us here and question why this was happening and what we should have been doing about it. But, alas, few were complaining when they were able to get 500k loans with sub 3 interest rates...
Hopefully someone will come along and save us, but it's hard to imagine who.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SPOT/spotify-techn...
https://dqydj.com/stock-return-calculator/
https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/
Shareholders have a 1.52% return since it went public, Apr 2018. A riskless investment in sp500 earned 11.7% since Apr 2018.
How much more do you want shareholders to lose? They have been losing 10%+ per year for 5.5 years.
I already showed you that shareholders have been losing money for 5.5 years (while employees were being paid).
The system that’s not working is literally the one in your head. Literally, your imagined ideals sign zero paychecks and add no value.
These people are the business and are often compensated in large part with meaningful equity. Everyone else (middle managers and contributors) are not the business - they just work for it. They are mainly compensated with a salary and are called employees. They are hired to complete tasks for the managers.
The managers will increase and decrease the number of employees based on the CEOs and other managers plan which the board approves. Plans often have certain assumptions that everyone (managers, not employees) agrees on and sometimes it doesn’t pan out so they have to change the plan.
Sometimes the managers resign or are fired when the plan fails and it was their fault. Other times they aren’t because it wasn’t something they could avoid (economic downturn, rise in rates, inflation, etc) or other reasons (they could be large shareholders themselves).
Just a nitpick, but this isn't the traditional definition of "riskless", which would be Treasuries. I believe the S&P 500 experiences an average drawdown of 14% in any given year, so it's hardly without risk.
You could more accurately say that SPOT has been underperforming "the market", "equities", or "beta".
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SPOT/holders/
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1639920/000119312518...
Source? Because losing money every year does not seem sustainable.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SPOT/spotify-techn...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDfNRWsMRsU
"The video starts by talking about how Spotify has become the dominant force in the music industry. In 2018, Spotify had over 200 million users and was paying out over $5 billion in royalties to artists. However, the video also points out that Spotify is not a very profitable company. In fact, Spotify has lost money every year since it was founded in 2006.
So, how does Spotify make money? The answer is that Spotify makes money by selling advertising. In 2018, Spotify generated over $1.2 billion in advertising revenue. This means that Spotify is essentially a media company that just happens to also offer music streaming.
The video also discusses the impact of streaming on artists. On the one hand, streaming has made it easier for people to discover new music. This can be a good thing for artists, as it can help them to reach a wider audience. On the other hand, streaming has also led to a decline in album sales. This is because people are no longer willing to pay $10 or $20 for an album when they can stream it for free on Spotify.
As a result of this, many artists are now struggling to make a living from their music. In fact, a study by the Berklee College of Music found that the median income for a full-time musician in the United States is just $20,000 per year.
So, what does the future hold for the music industry? The video argues that the music industry is in a state of flux. It is unclear how artists will be able to make a living in the future, and it is also unclear how Spotify will be able to continue to grow its business."
you can't lose money indefinitely
This differs from e.g. Google that runs a large ad platform used not only by several of their own services, but also external products and services (other websites and apps).
[1]: https://s29.q4cdn.com/175625835/files/doc_financials/2022/ar... (p. 51)
Unfortunately, that's an example of where A.I. didn't do a good job of extracting the key thesis of Benn Jordan's argument. Arguably, Benn Jordan himself didn't make it easy for the automatic semantic algorithm to summarize his main point because he's not stating it clearly enough and sprinkles in tangents throughout the presentation.
Basically, he says "Spotify Will Fail" because they created a flawed and unsustainable economic structure which happened because it signed lopsided licensing deals with the Big 3 Labels that leaves no significant money for smaller artists trying to make a living. Spotify had to "overpay" for the Big Labels song catalog to attract a large userbase so its current financial history has been a roundabout funneling of VC investment money (and most subscribers' money) into the Big 3 Labels rather than create a sustainable streaming business where more musicians can share in the pie.
The random sentences extracted by Bard AI hide Benn's core thesis.
The other sentences not extracted are the ones that support Benn's main argument: (1) the lopsided Sony licensing deal example, (2) the various other examples of VC money spent on subsidizing fundamentally unprofitable businesses structures for participants (Uber, $9.99 unlimited movies at theaters, etc).
That is why Spotify are desperately trying to produce their own content, most notably in the podcast space, and I suspect why they also recently branched out into audiobooks, as every hour spent listening to an audiobook displaces a dozen or so royalty-generating song plays.
You would think they could pull a "Netflix and House of Cards" to use all of their play data to find exactly which kind of niche singer/songwriter people would want to hear. They could then use their reach + algorithms to float their artists into people's "discover new" playlists.
Probably because music is spread quite far and the labels have a tight grip on the industry. If you want to have the music most people listen to, you need to have the top talent. Also, music is not as fungible as music is - if Spotify is lacking popular music, people are going to be discontent, use less playlists and use Spotify less in return.
> You would think they could pull a "Netflix and House of Cards" to use all of their play data to find exactly which kind of niche singer/songwriter people would want to hear.
I'm not sure this is working that well for Netflix. It has lot of pressure with competing streaming services that market their exclusives and their library is pretty lacking, compared to a few years ago.
Netflix is pretty much the only service that is profitable, so it is.
Exclusivity works. Netflix made it work pretty well. Spotify can't.
In essence use their size to pay more than record labels and eventually acquire them.
Turns out, cartel >>> aggregator.
For those against clicking:
00:00:00 - 00:15:00
The author of the video argues that Spotify will ultimately fail due to the high cost of membership, the fact that streaming services pay independent musicians less than traditional music platforms, and the company's neglect of its only asset - its artists.
00:00:00 The author of the video argues that Spotify will ultimately fail because of the high cost of membership and the fact that streaming services pay independent musicians less than traditional music platforms.
00:05:00 The author of the video makes the case that Spotify will eventually fail because of its business model, which relies on rapid growth and unsustainable levels of value in the music industry. He argues that if Spotify's independent musicians were paid more fairly, the platform would be unable to survive.
00:10:00 The author of the video argues that Spotify will eventually fail due to the company's neglect of its only asset - its artists. The author believes that this neglect will lead to the eventual collapse of the streaming music industry as a whole. However, he also believes that this collapse will be hastened by the fact that for-profit companies are required to eventually pay their investors as little as possible.
00:15:00 The author of this video argues that streaming services like Spotify will ultimately fail because they rely on artificial scarcity (i.e. the notion that there are not enough songs available to listen to on the platform). They suggest that instead of using streaming services, musicians should focus on releasing their music on their own platforms, such as Bandcamp or their own website.
In essence a type of payola since they have a lot of sway in picking winners and losers. They sort of tried this with podcasts but I’m not sure those move needles like music can.
So yeah their current model may be limited but they have a lot to work with.
They have also vertically integrated in the opposite direction: by making deals with large media corporations, and also by implementing DRM (to appease those media corporations).
So at this point, there isn't much vertical integration left to be had. Any more deals with individual artists (or labels) would really just be horizontal integration.
> So yeah their current model may be limited but they have a lot to work with.
That limit is practically the entire worldwide music industry. They are very close to that limit, and seem utterly ignorant about it.
https://s29.q4cdn.com/175625835/files/doc_financials/2023/q3...
Ultimately Spotify's staff costs are significant because they were throwing people at trying to make the podcasting business work, which was a failed bet but they need to do.
The main issue though is that buying licenses to music is just too expensive for the amount of money they charge, and they need to license less stuff or charge more money.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/net-inc...
That is not hype, that is cash.
The point is Tesla earns a lot of money, and has a good, proven trajectory.
Counterpoint: almost no one I know uses it. It was fun at first but became boring fast, a bit like Netflix. If I want to listen to music I use youtube.
Care to link to evidence?
> Everyone has posts of their Spotify Wrapped.
Did someone check with _everyone_? It feels like when people make such statments they refer to their own bubble. "It is known" is not a valid argument.
These services are global with hundreds of millions of users or more. There’s nothing useful to be extrapolated from the usage patterns of yourself and a handful of friends.
(Personally I only listen to Amiga MODs and watch 8mm home movies of my mother while whistling the theme from “Psycho”.)
Because any growth in profits that spotify sees will quickly be eaten by music rights holders.
They will never be able to, regardless of how much they pricing the platform, the music majors will renegotiate and ask all of their profits.
Also the fucking music industry sucks.
I also used to work for a company that used to have a streaming service and they paid like over 20 million alone just to the record industry.