[HN Gopher] Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately...
___________________________________________________________________
Spotify will reduce total headcount by approximately 17%
Author : filleokus
Score : 547 points
Date : 2023-12-04 07:23 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (newsroom.spotify.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (newsroom.spotify.com)
| techstacktoe wrote:
| All things considered, the note seems honest - lays out the facts
| and considerations. The severance package seems quite generous as
| well.
| vsnf wrote:
| Written with a first-person active voice too, unlike many
| bureaucratic notes.
|
| > I have made the difficult decision to reduce our total
| headcount by approximately 17% across the company.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Agreed. And the considerations they made seem to be factual
| too.
|
| I think this was the first corporate notice about layoffs that
| didn't read like absolute bullshit.
| Epa095 wrote:
| > The severance package seems quite generous as well.
|
| I guess it depends a bit what they mean by `the average
| employee receiving approximately five months of severance` (and
| also where you are seeing it from, maybe its seen as more
| generous when seen from the US). In Sweeden the notice period
| for the employer is between 1 and 6 months, depending on how
| long the empoyee has worked there. If they count that period in
| as part of the severance package, it could wery well be "the
| legal minimum" or "the legal minimum + 2 months", which sounds
| less great than 5 months :-p
|
| If its "the legal minimum + approximately 5 months" then it's
| generous.
|
| In the other developer-downscalings I know about here in
| Scandinavia (Norway if it matters) the most common deal has
| been 6 months, either "work for the remaining notice period,
| then 6 months pay" or "6 months pay, you work out the current
| month". I say "deal", because its a deal where the employee
| gets that pay, and then resigns voluntarily. If they don't take
| the deal they only receive the legal minimum, but they can then
| fight the firering, which can get expensive and complicated (I
| have never heard about anyone not taking the deal).
| thelastknowngod wrote:
| Yeah you're not entitled to anything in the States. There are
| no employment contracts and you can be fired for any reason
| without notice. The only reason to give severance is to avoid
| bad publicity. There isn't any mandate that the company has
| to offer anything.
|
| There really should be though especially when the company in
| question was able to afford $1 billion in stock buybacks just
| 2 years ago, and when the CEO has a $3 billion net worth, and
| when they are well known for not paying their suppliers (the
| artists) a fair price for the content they create.
| relativ575 wrote:
| > There are no employment contracts and you can be fired
| for any reason without notice.
|
| You can also leave the job at any time, which as a frequent
| HN user I'm sure you know and may have used it to your
| advantage.
|
| > There really should be though especially when the company
| in question was able to afford $1 billion in stock buybacks
| just 2 years ago, and when the CEO has a $3 billion net
| worth
|
| They were also in a hiring spree 2 years ago, like many
| tech companies. Many of the current employees wouldn't have
| a job otherwise.
|
| The CEO is also the founder of the company, who built it
| over time from scratch. There have been many ups and downs
| during their 17 year history. 10,000 jobs didn't appear
| overnight. We hardly hear when company hire, only when they
| let people go.
|
| > and when they are well known for not paying their
| suppliers (the artists) a fair price for the content they
| create.
|
| Apparently they don't make big fat profit given this layoff
| UncleMeat wrote:
| The employer/employee relationship is imbalanced. The
| ability to leave jobs instantly is not equivalently
| powerful as the ability to fire people instantly. A
| corporation that loses an employee suddenly is typically
| disrupted in a very minor way. A person that loses their
| job instantly might not make rent next month.
| lucaspm98 wrote:
| 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.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| 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.
| Sparkle-san wrote:
| That's not entirely true, the US has the WARN act which
| requires 60 days notice for large layoffs.
| sgerenser wrote:
| 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.
| wcfields wrote:
| 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.
|
| "I don't recall saying good luck"
| pcurve wrote:
| I agree, but this part bothered me.
|
| "Today, we still have too many people dedicated to supporting
| work and even doing work around the work rather than
| contributing to opportunities with real impact. More people
| need to be focused on delivering for our key stakeholders -
| creators and consumers. "
|
| While this is likely partly true, this is mostly management's
| fault. I didn't see anything in the email that talks post-
| mortem about the root cause and how it will be prevented going
| forward.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| > too many people dedicated to supporting work and even doing
| work around the work
|
| Damn, that's every job I've ever had.
| thiago_fm wrote:
| They need a bigger cut. 17% will not have a big enough impact to
| its bottom line.
|
| They need to have enough money to invest in other initiatives, as
| the business they are in is proven to be margin-thin.
|
| Apple and Amazon will eventually eat Spotify given enough time,
| if they don't find a moat to be built
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> They need a bigger cut. 17% will not have a big enough
| impact to its bottom line._
|
| What's stopping them from bigger cuts? We've seen that big SW
| products can run on lean teams(whatsapp, post-Musk Twitter) and
| we know many large tech companies are overloaded with way more
| workers than they need to run(Google), just because they could
| overhire when money was free.
|
| _> Apple and Amazon will eventually eat Spotify given enough
| time, if they don't find a moat to be built_
|
| What prevents Google from doing the same? They already have a
| large customer base in Android users.
| csunbird wrote:
| Google themselves? Given the popularity of the YouTube they
| should have won a decade ago, but they have not.
|
| The inefficiency of Google always amazes me.
| chewz wrote:
| > The inefficiency of Google always amazes me.
|
| It's the kind of people they attract. IBM types...
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> The inefficiency of Google always amazes me._
|
| As long as they have the cheat code for unlimited free
| money(ads) they can be as inefficient as they want.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| About a decade ago they had Google Music. A friend of mine
| really liked it. He was supposed to have a for-life price
| of $7/month (or something) and then they raised prices and
| failed to grandfather his price in. Being Google, there was
| no way for him to complain about this to them, so he
| cancelled and used a product he liked less, out of spite.
| At some point they launched a duplicative product, YouTube
| Music, which they later migrated all customers to.
|
| So you know, the standard Google experience.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> He was supposed to have a for-life price of $7/month_
|
| At this point, consumers should know that "for life
| price" is a scam to get gullible customers through the
| door and gain market share or collect user data. Just
| like with a Ponzi scheme, consumers should realize by now
| why such pricing is not sustainable long term due to
| inflation and other costs, and either the business will
| crash or they'll have to inevitably backtrack on that
| promise and raise prices to stay afloat. You can't have
| your cake and eat it too.
|
| No excusing Google of this scam, but they only did what
| every other company with these kind of hollow promises
| did.
|
| I vividly remember Cerberus on Android was selling one
| time licenses for life, only for them to backtrack on
| that years later and switch everyone to their
| subscription instead, publishing a letter along the lines
| of "sorry, we know it sucks, but the lifetime licenses we
| sold you are unsustainable financially for us, so we'll
| switch you to subscription UwU."
|
| Same with Google's unlimited Photo storage.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| My recollection is that others retained that price, it
| was a bug or oversight that caused him specifically to
| have the price increased.
|
| I'm sure when they migrated users to YouTube Music they
| got rid of the special deal.
| htrp wrote:
| It's almost always for the lifetime of the product?
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Google Play Music, YouTube Music, YouTube Music Premium,
| YouTube Red, now YouTube Premium.
|
| Who knows what Google's music play will be next year? Not
| Google. Media is second only to Messaging for their lack of a
| consistent long term strategy.
| fooker wrote:
| For anything other than American and maybe European music,
| YouTube Music is so much better nowadays wrt availability.
| YouTube Music has stellar quality of recommendations too.
|
| But Google could easily do a Google and sabotage the product
| at some point.
| macrolime wrote:
| YouTube Music still only has a tiny fraction of the music
| available on YouTube.
| fooker wrote:
| Everything in YouTube comes up when searched from YouTube
| Music.
| nova22033 wrote:
| _post-Musk Twitter_
|
| 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.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| > Apple and Amazon will eventually eat Spotify given enough
| time, if they don't find a moat to be built
|
| I doubt it.
|
| Apple is restricted to Apple devices. As for Amazon, the same
| argument could be made about Prime Video eating Netflix, and
| that never seemed to happen.
|
| On top of that, as far as I know, Spotify is profitable.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Apple Music is not restricted to Apple devices afaik: https:/
| /play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.andr...
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Oh wow, I didn't know that.
|
| I still wouldn't use it, but I am surprised that I never
| knew of this.
| anon23432343 wrote:
| You can listen to apple music even via web interface and it
| has an android app and works on android tv and android auto.
|
| So pretty much everywhere.
| jamespo wrote:
| Can't listen natively on my lametric time!
| Mindwipe wrote:
| Spotify had one profitable quarter by fluke. It's not
| profitable.
| ardit33 wrote:
| 17% is a huge cut. More than that and you end up damaging
| operations. Look what is happening to X / Twitter.
|
| PS. Spotify had already two layoffs, once 6% in Jan 2023 and 2%
| in June. This combined seems like a 25% ish cut.
| rapsey wrote:
| It's seeing more use than ever with a fraction of the staff?
| epistasis wrote:
| Unless they can somehow turn "use" into money, more use
| does nothing to help X as a company. And the prior method
| of turning use into money, advertisements, has been
| dropping like a rock due to the inability of the company to
| keep ads away from toxic content no advertiser would ever
| want their ads near.
|
| Can't cut costs to profitability if you are cutting revenue
| faster than costs.
| carb wrote:
| - 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.
| hackernewds wrote:
| but is it growing? they have the privilege of maintaining
| an amazing product
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| 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.
| toboche wrote:
| Twitter doesn't have to pay the huge content fees as Spotify
| does.
| puszczyk wrote:
| They do have to payback the loans that were taken to do the
| leveraged buyout
| konschubert wrote:
| Why do they need to invest?
|
| They can also just keep being the most complete music streaming
| service.
|
| That is a low margin business, but it's a business, and you
| probably don't need a lot of people to run it.
| i386 wrote:
| Using Apple Music on a few Google devices now.
| hackernewds wrote:
| their moat is exploiting the copyright system with
| monopolistic contracts with record labels
| konschubert wrote:
| Monopolistic how?
| piva00 wrote:
| 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...
| pembrook wrote:
| 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.
| thewildginger wrote:
| This is an anecdote, and maybe it's just coincidental timing,
| but these kinds of operational choices do not work well in a
| company focused on a single product across multiple devices.
| Losing so many workers so quickly means a loss in
| productivity on the issues the platform has, and Spotify has
| many. Since November there has been an issue on PS5 where any
| podcast over an hour will not play on PlayStation(so,
| basically all podcasts). People have figured out the issue,
| and Spotify has not moved on it.
|
| When you offer a single service and the benefit is being
| device agnostic, "cutting costs" by wasting time hiring
| people you probably didn't need to hire only to fire them a
| year or two later means an amplified disruption that will
| lose customers.
|
| But hey, board members who jerk each other off once a month
| in a conference call who are already rich made _a little more
| money_ by hiring a bunch of people only to fire them later
| and at a huge operational waste.
|
| This is how our world works and it's bs.
| chewz wrote:
| > However, after that experience, I'm starting to think
| there's no way in hell a massive multi-product conglomerate
| like Apple/Amazon is going to overtake a single-product music
| streamer like Spotify.
|
| Amazon Music Unlimited is very neat experience compared to
| Spotify... Good catalogue (for me), better music quality and
| it's app is just plain, boring music player not something
| neurotic like Spotify...
| ryanSrich wrote:
| 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.
| s3p wrote:
| Moat??? Spotify has the largest userbase period. Paying or non
| paying. Apple and Google haven't been able to take their market
| share.
| acdha wrote:
| How much profit does Apple make versus Spotify per user?
| Android has had a larger user base but that hasn't made it
| more profitable.
| dboreham wrote:
| Perhaps this cut is a precursor to being acquired by someone
| like Apple?
| mvdtnz wrote:
| I wonder how those losing their jobs feel about Spotify's
| reported $200 million investment in Joe Rogan now.
| anon23432343 wrote:
| 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...
| 10u152 wrote:
| You don't listen to Joe Rogan to listen to Joe Rogan. You
| listen because he has the most interesting guests on.
| anon23432343 wrote:
| And lets people spread fake news and stupid theories.
|
| Just because they are "interesting" they should not get a
| free promo.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| That's precisely what people like about it. Anyone can
| come on his show. No matter how batshit crazy. Many
| people don't want to be coddled and protected from
| viewpoints other people have decided are fake news or
| stupid. They can make up the balance themselves.
| kvetching wrote:
| That's your opinion. Most guests have a wealth of
| knowledge that shouldn't be discounted outright.
| asynchronous wrote:
| "But but misinfo!" Man I hate where we're at for free
| speech in the West.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| Joe Rogan isn't an insightful, active listener like Charlie
| Rose was and with actual interesting guests at a higher
| signal level.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| >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.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| I feel neither positively nor negatively about Rogan himself
| (I've never listened to him) but it was plainly a very stupid
| investment on Spotify's part. Anyone could have predicted
| (and most of us did) that only a fraction of his audience
| would follow him behind the paywall and removing him from
| mainstream free outlets would instantly diminish his cultural
| relevance.
| bluescrn wrote:
| 'Diminishing his cultural relevance' may have been the
| goal.
|
| Reducing his audience, censoring his most controversial
| past episodes and preventing certain conversations from
| happening in front of his large audience in future?
| Shish2k wrote:
| 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?
| bluescrn wrote:
| Elon paid vastly more for Twitter, seemingly primarily as
| an act of activism.
|
| In this incredibly divided world, politics has started to
| come before profit.
| Shish2k wrote:
| 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?
| rickdeckard wrote:
| It wasn't a "sinking-ship podcast platform", it was
| Spotify's strategy to own content and thus reduce cost
| for per-play licensing.
|
| They went for the Netflix strategy for growth. We now
| know the podcast-idea didn't translate into as many paid
| subscribers as they expected, but with ~25% of all
| Spotify subscribers listening to podcasts [1] it's not a
| "sinking-ship podcast platform"
|
| [1] https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/spotify-
| podcast-subscr...
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| FWIW, there is rationale for platform to own content vs
| licensing deal that forces platform's hand to 'make
| unavailable' items their customers already purchased[1].
|
| Not that I disagree with you.
|
| [1]https://www.playstation.com/en-
| us/legal/psvideocontent/?et_r...
| dundarious wrote:
| 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.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| The frame of reference is "was", so back in 2019 when
| Spotify negotiated with Joe Rogan
| teg4n_ wrote:
| 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
| rickdeckard wrote:
| That would be Spotify's Direct Distribution Contract,
| something they also established in 2018, shortly before
| (or in parallel with) their podcast acquisition strategy.
| Shish2k wrote:
| > It wasn't a "sinking-ship podcast platform"
|
| I think you may have missed the context for this thread
| :) You're talking about reality - I'm talking about the
| hypothesis that Spotify chained Joe Rogan to their
| platform because they wanted him to drown, which implies
| not only that the platform is sinking, but that it's
| doing so deliberately.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| paywall? all you have to do is sign up for the freemium
| version of spotify?
| baby wrote:
| He's a great podcaster.
| epistasis wrote:
| Good enough to bring in $200M of revenue through
| subscriptions or ads?
| rapsey wrote:
| 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.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| By definition he is since that is what spotify paid now.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| that wasnt the purpose of buying him. the purpose was to
| buy a gigantic audience of listeners that would hopefully
| now use spotify as their main podcast app
| kvetching wrote:
| 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.
| Shish2k wrote:
| Are "it was a stupid decision to buy him" and "I don't get
| why people listen to him" supposed to be related statements?
| The business decision isn't about _your_ personal feelings,
| it's about his objectively measurably enormous audience
| anon23432343 wrote:
| I want to see how they got the 200 million back and as they
| have to lay off 17% of there people it looks like a stupid
| decision in the end.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| It's a ridiculous amount of money for that content.
|
| But looking back at those days where all platform
| embraced a strategy to "own ALL content", I doubt that
| the 2nd-best offer was significantly less.
|
| After all, they also paid him to NOT make any further
| money with the podcast on YouTube or other platforms...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > 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.
| rickdeckard wrote:
| Spotify is largely owned by those businesses, that was
| part of the deal to get them to even open their catalog
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| That is not true.
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SPOT/holders/
|
| Any ownership by the record labels must be less than 1%.
| Roritharr wrote:
| Would you say that about any other type of media/culture/art
| you dislike?
|
| "I don't get why people like the Mona Lisa, the painting is
| neither original nor particularly well done"
|
| Is just as much a subjective statement. JRE is, by most
| released figures the top interview podcast on the planet, his
| interviews regularly move Charts of third party media like
| Book Bestseller Lists and Music Charts.
|
| There obviously is a huge audience and value there and I can
| only assume their agreement over 200M was based on some
| pretty solid math.
| coryrc wrote:
| > I can only assume their agreement over 200M was based on
| some pretty solid math.
|
| Working at Microsoft during the Ballmer era and seeing the
| number of multi-billion-dollar acquisitions written-down to
| nothing, I would never assume corporations spend large
| amounts wisely.
| Roritharr wrote:
| You certainly have a point there, but I also remember
| being absolutely wrong about the Minecraft aquisition
| which has now paid for itself multiple times.
|
| Your math doesn't have to work out, even if it's solid.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| 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.
| walteweiss wrote:
| I will never understand why that idiot was hired as a CEO
| in the first place.
| xdennis wrote:
| I think, sometimes, buying the competition and killing it
| is the intended effect. Especially if you're as anti-
| competitive as Microsoft.
| kvonhorn wrote:
| > "I don't get why people like the Mona Lisa, the painting
| is neither original nor particularly well done"
|
| And it's so small, too.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| 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
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| It's simple, different people have different opinions in life
| and his show is still the most popular podcast on spotify.
| was it worth $200 million, I have my doubts on that one.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| You don't watch Joe Rogan for Joe Rogan. You watch Joe Rogan
| for the guests. I love his episodes with Elon Musk.
| eddtries wrote:
| It's light entertainment and he tends to cover topics I am
| interested in like BJJ/Muay Thai. If he goes on about Covid
| etc I just half listen, it's rarely that long.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > I don't get why people listen to him...
|
| People have different tastes. That's OK.
|
| The Joe Rogan Experience has continued to be at the top of
| Spotify's podcast charts, bringing in 11m listeners an
| episode.
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianbushard/2023/07/03/top-
| pod...
| baby wrote:
| I feel like you're implying something but I don't get it.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| To spell it out for you, $200 million could pay for well over
| 1,000 employee-years of salaries.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Companies exist to make money, not to be a charity for
| their employees.
| soderfoo wrote:
| I get what you are saying but you would be surprised how
| fast financial forecasts balloon at scale.
|
| 200 developers @ $150k a year = $30M
|
| $200M/$30M = 6.5 years
| whiddershins wrote:
| It's also not $150k/year. Employees cost far more than
| their salary.
| AdamN wrote:
| Rule of thumb is double. So if you're average total comp
| is $150k then total cost for each of those employees is
| $300k/employee (office, expenses, HVAC, insurance, etc..)
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| I think you're both saying the same thing. Op is saying 1
| employee for 1 year is "1 employee-year".
| epistasis wrote:
| The implication I see is that the $200M was not worth it.
|
| I don't know their financials, but it seems quite unlikely
| that a single podcast would be worth that valuation.
| rapsey wrote:
| Rogan was not making that much less on youtube. Keep in
| mind pre-spotify he was literally making NFL numbers for
| listeners+viewers per episode.
| vharish wrote:
| I don't think he's that popular anymore.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| According to Google Trends, he was more popular in 2020
| to early 2022 with some wild spike there, but it seems
| stabilised for now, at similar rates as in 2018.
| notyofriend wrote:
| Less reach with Spotify
| andsoitis wrote:
| The Joe Rogan Experience is at the top of Spotify's U.S.
| podcast charts, and had the biggest weekly audience in
| the U.S. so far this year, and is widely estimated to
| bring in 11 million listeners per episode.
|
| His show is the top podcast worldwide on Spotify each of
| the last three years -- nearly double the second-place
| podcast, true crime series Crime Junkie, which has an
| estimated 5.9 million listeners per episode.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianbushard/2023/07/03/top-
| pod...
| teg4n_ wrote:
| could it be that people that want to listen to his show
| use spotify for only listening to his show and a real
| podcast app to listen to regular podcasts? if i was
| inclined to listen to rogan that's what i would do.
| mr90210 wrote:
| I personally think that he was better off pre-Spotify.
| Surely a bit of less money, but so does less drama. And
| Pre-Spotify he had the power to diversify himself in
| other platforms as well.
| myvoiceismypass wrote:
| People have been saying the same thing about Howard Stern
| and his very large Sirius contract. And yet, SiriusXM keeps
| re-signing him.
| rapsey wrote:
| We will find out soon enough because his contract is running
| out.
| loandbehold wrote:
| 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.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| > Joe Rogan brings in 10s millions of listeners
|
| Has this ever been confirmed by Spotify?
| epistasis wrote:
| What revenue do these listeners bring?
| loandbehold wrote:
| Spotify makes money through ads for non-paying users and
| subscription fees from paying users. For non-paying users,
| time listened translates into ad impressions. New content
| also brings in new paid subscribers, as it makes
| subscription more valuable to the user allowing listening
| without ads.
| whiddershins wrote:
| Also, even when you pay, Rogan still has ads.
| o-alex wrote:
| A more suitable comparison would be between the book contents
| and the paper and fonts of the text. I don't know how much
| you would enjoy a book on bad paper and bad, barely legible
| text.
| loandbehold wrote:
| Yes, but printing book legibly is a solved problem. So all
| books in the bookstore are legible. Books are competing on
| content, not legibility.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| 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
| bede wrote:
| 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.
| coldpie wrote:
| > for a few months
|
| Heh. There's a zillion perfectly good competitors in this
| space. Why not just permanently switch to one that doesn't
| fund conspiracy theory wackos?
| bede wrote:
| 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.
| coldpie wrote:
| I use DI.fm (lots of fresh electronic music there!) and
| Google Music via my YouTube subscription.
| massysett wrote:
| "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?
| bede wrote:
| 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.
| massysett wrote:
| 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.
| slig wrote:
| > I cancelled my subscription for a few months in protest.
|
| Good for you, I'm sure that made a huge impact.
| starcraft2wol wrote:
| I feel a lot of my faith in public health scientists was also
| burned.
| TMWNN wrote:
| Assuming that investing in Rogan did what Spotify hoped it
| would (driving enough subscriptions to make a profit), not
| having made the investment would have meant more layoffs now.
| jzb wrote:
| Opposite for me. I cancelled because of that. Partially
| because I didn't like Spotify endorsing his content, but also
| because I subscribed to Spotify for _music_ , not podcasts.
|
| I wanted to see them invest more in features around music and
| work on better compensation for artists - not spend my
| subscription money on shoving podcast content at me.
| slig wrote:
| I wonder why they force podcasts so much. I've never
| listened to them, and I'm sure they have that data, and the
| recommendations are way, way off anything I'd consider
| listening to.
| rightbyte wrote:
| I guess they try to force it because they have higher
| margins on them.
|
| Podcast are cheaper to produce and requires no record
| label sharing the profits with Spotify.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| 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.
| jzb wrote:
| 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.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Why would you assume that?
| yourusername wrote:
| At least Rogan is still one of the most popular podcasters in
| the world. They paid a similar ammount for Gimlet and that
| company is now completely defunct and all their hit podcasts
| either jumped ship or stopped. So that was probably a worse
| investment.
| alecco wrote:
| 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.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| Whoa I hadn't heard about this one. That's madness.
| andsoitis wrote:
| The Joe Rogan Experience has continued to be at the top of
| Spotify's podcast charts in 2023. It has the biggest weekly
| audience in the US (Edison Research) and is estimated to bring
| in 11 million listeners per episode.
|
| It is also the top podcast _worldwide_ on Spotify. Second place
| goes to Crime Junkie, which has half the listener numbers.
|
| Source:
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianbushard/2023/07/03/top-pod...
| rob74 wrote:
| > _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"
| TapWaterBandit wrote:
| Eh, what's the alternative? Some people have this weird
| attitude that businesses are not allowed to shrink/fail.
| Businesses can only ever go one direction and that is more
| headcount, otherwise give them govt bailout.
|
| Businesses need to be able to grow and shrink. Otherwise we
| just end up with "too big to fail".
| robin_reala wrote:
| I don't think the complaint was in the action, but the
| horrible wording.
| epistasis wrote:
| I'm not sure which of the wordings is supposed to be worse.
| They are both bad. But that is the nature of a company on
| the edge of survival.
| hackernewds wrote:
| 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
| acdha wrote:
| 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.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| 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.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| Er... There's nothing wrong with that. I mean, we do live in a
| world where businesses are supposed to be profitable. Companies
| hire and companies fire, that is part of the deal.
|
| One thing is to have layoffs when you are raking in record
| profits. This doesn't seem to be the case. The text makes a
| decent enough case.
| hackernewds wrote:
| sure, but call a spade a spade instead of making the layoffs
| seem mandatory. there are inputs to financial goals -
| including executive greed.
| rob74 wrote:
| Or stock market greed... of course, if you subscribe to the
| "greed is good" school of thought, you may also see that as
| positive.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Not sure if I'd go so far as saying "greed is good", but
| if it weren't for the expectation by investors that
| companies would attempt to be as profitable as possible,
| companies like Spotify wouldn't exist.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Spotify stock has lost 10% per year relative to SP500
| (riskless). It is crazy to call not wanting to lose 10%
| per year "greedy".
| styren wrote:
| Well, if they determine that firing 17% of staff will lead
| to greater profits then it seems pretty mandatory based on
| his fiduciary duty to the board.
| acdha wrote:
| 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.
| google234123 wrote:
| Really their ceo should resign for making the same
| mistake as almost every tech company
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| What would your plan be to stop Spotify from losing tens
| and hundreds of millions of Euros per year?
| rchaud wrote:
| Raise prices to a point where the company can be a going
| concern without needing to find new financing to buy
| every podcast under the sun.
|
| Spotify is one of the few companies that raises prices
| every year but somehow get further away from making a
| profit.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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.
| chii wrote:
| > 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.
| make3 wrote:
| ? it's a normal capitalist corporation, what exactly did you
| expect
| dehrmann wrote:
| That's not wrong, but they also hired-up for a new podcast
| business that wasn't as successful as they hoped.
| ardit33 wrote:
| Sad to see this happening to my former co-workers. At least it
| looks like the severance seems to be generous.
|
| "We will start with a baseline for all employees, with the
| average employee receiving approximately five months of
| severance."
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| 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.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| I would assume it's mostly optimisation and bug fixing.
| Improving their ability to read files globally, improving
| availability, etc.
|
| Plus internal tools will probably be a major thing too.
| scarab92 wrote:
| All the pointless redesigns was a pretty clear sign that they
| had excess engineering headcount.
| fullshark wrote:
| I saw it as a sign that they needed to find ways to get
| people to spend time listening to anything that is
| proprietary (podcasts, unique recommendation algorithms) to
| avoid just being the middle man for music streaming and
| getting squeezed by the publishers for all their revenue.
|
| Edit: By proprietary I mean - owned by Spotify.
| rightbyte wrote:
| The music _is_ propertiary. Even recordings of Mozart is
| unless the recording is older than an ever increasing limit
| of a bazillion years.
| fullshark wrote:
| Yeah but it's not owned by Spotify, at least the most
| popular music isn't. I mean: they want you to listen to
| things they own, not things they license.
| apwell23 wrote:
| It wasn't pointless. Spotify's whole existence depends on
| moving from background listening to active foreground use.
|
| It would be pointless for them to stay an passive background
| app. Might as well shutdown the company and cut the losses.
| mlrtime wrote:
| 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?
| prox wrote:
| 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.
| apwell23 wrote:
| > I just want to create 5 or 10 statiosn that auto pick based
| on certain criteria, does this exist?
|
| Can you describe the criteria ?
| coldpie wrote:
| Just try a different service. There's a zillion of them out
| there, all more or less interchangeable. Maybe one has the
| feature you want.
| erellsworth wrote:
| I'm not sure how specific you want your criteria to be, but
| you can create a Spotify "radio" station based off of any
| song, band/artist, or playlist. Spotify's discovery
| capabilities are miles beyond Pandora, in my opinion.
| sometdog wrote:
| They removed the ability to create "radio" stations off of
| playlists, which does make discovery somewhat more
| difficult.
| erellsworth wrote:
| Oh man, I didn't know they did that. Lame.
| erellsworth wrote:
| Looks like they replaced it with the "smart shuffle"
| feature.
| chinchilla2020 wrote:
| > Why doesn't Spotify still not have a Pandora style radio
| station? I just want to create 5 or 10 statiosn that auto
| pick based on certain criteria, does this exist?
|
| Spotify does have this. They've had it forever. It
| automatically happens after listening to a song you like, or
| you can make a playlist and generate a radio off of it.
|
| The recommendations are so far ahead of pandora it's like the
| difference between AIM chatbots and GPT-4. I use spotify but
| my boat friend uses pandora when we go out and I am
| astonished by how bad the matching on it is.
| dom96 wrote:
| In my experience the recommendations are always converging
| to songs I've already listened to hundreds of times.
| code_runner wrote:
| even though I primarily use spotify for podcasts, the radio
| functionality is something I've used for like.... 8 years
| delfinom wrote:
| My condolences for when you try to cancel SiriusXM one day.
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| I still hate the change about the "add to playlist/like" button
| with all my heart. I don't want to like all the songs I add to
| playlists. I have a few hundred playlists with a looooot of
| songs (I listened to 86000 minutes last year of over 4000
| artists ...). That change was utterly idiotic
| mrWiz wrote:
| 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?
| alephnan wrote:
| There was a meme about Spotify replacing the heart symbol to
| like a song with a '+' sign.
|
| No one asked for, it benefits no one, and people proactively
| want the old version.
|
| I'm sure they had countless meetings for this "feature" and how
| much human hours. There would have been a designer, and a
| researcher. There would have also been a data scientist lying
| with statistics about how this change moved the core business
| metrics.
|
| That's from my personal experience of working in FANG and
| people doing unscientific and statistically invalid analysis of
| noise.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| This change reminds me of Netflix replacing their 5(?)-star
| rating system, with a simple thumbs up / down system.
|
| Netflix claimed there was statistical justification for the
| change, but my _most charitable_ interpretation is that their
| goals don 't align with mine.
| wombat-man wrote:
| 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.
| gizajob wrote:
| 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.
| jpalawaga wrote:
| 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.
| jzb wrote:
| 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.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Spotify works on like a million different devices for one
| thing.
| adamhp wrote:
| I don't work for and am not affiliated with Spotify in any way,
| but I can honestly say Spotify has added more value to my life
| than almost any other app I have downloaded. I have discovered
| so much music that I genuinely adore. It's honestly mind-
| boggling. I'm so excited to open up my Discover Weekly. I'm
| very grateful for the work that has gone into their curation of
| certain playlists and of the similarity scoring they are doing
| because my musical perspective has broadened tremendously since
| I regularly started listening to my Discover Weekly.
|
| Again, sounds like I'm some secret corporate shill or something
| but I truly am just genuinely appreciative of the service.
| dbrueck wrote:
| I'm in both camps: Spotify is hands down the best ROI for me
| in terms of where my streaming dollars go.
|
| OTOH, it drives me crazy that customers like myself have been
| begging them for many years to add basic features like
| remembering my spot in a playlist.
| fundatus wrote:
| > remembering my spot in a playlist
|
| Can you elaborate? Seriously curious how that exactly would
| look like.
| dbrueck wrote:
| 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.
| vvillena wrote:
| Maybe a "resume" button next to the "play" button in the
| playlist page. Or just an option hidden in the "..."
| menu.
| mholm wrote:
| 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.
| cm277 wrote:
| 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).
| maxverse wrote:
| 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.
| jamesblonde wrote:
| You will hear more about the new term "RIF" not - reduction in
| force. Nobody likes to say we had layoffs, so corporate speak
| will be - we did a RIF ...blah blah.
|
| It's terrible, because i love playing guitar, and they are
| screwing with the english language as normal people use it.
| epistasis wrote:
| There is a semantic difference in the terms:
|
| > In the past, layoffs typically came with an expectation that
| the employee might be rehired if more work became available or
| the employer's financial condition improved. An RIF, on the
| hand, did not come with such an expectation; it usually meant
| that a certain position or an entire department was being
| eliminated. https://www.lawyers.com/legal-info/labor-
| employment-law/rif-...
| jamesblonde wrote:
| That "semantic difference" is justification for using the
| word, but the intent behind using RIF is the usual - water
| down the harshness of the thing.
|
| I don't buy we need a new word for this. Particularly this
| justification is nonsense - "layoffs typically came with an
| expectation that the employee might be rehired if more work
| became available or the employer's financial condition
| improved"
|
| Who said this is true? Like say 30 years ago, IBM fired 30%
| of people. They didn't need to call it a RIF. Like would they
| re-hire the people because OS/2 took off?
| sgerenser wrote:
| I've only heard the term "Layoff" in regards to a temporary
| staff reduction in the trades/blue collar/seasonal work. In
| white collar jobs, layoff has pretty much always meant a
| permanent staff reduction.
| epistasis wrote:
| Language is not the same thing to all people. Having two
| different terms, one for permanent changes and one for more
| temporary changes, seems useful and beneficial to the
| language.
|
| For you, the distinction in terms apparently does not
| exist. But for some, including me, this distinction exists.
| Would it not be better for us all to adopt the distinction?
| jamesblonde wrote:
| Is it not better to be just understood? Like 0.01% of the
| population know what RIF means.
|
| 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.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Super good time to announce layoffs, at the start of the month
| where everyone is preparing for time off and holidays.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| Yep. Maximizing fuck-over of employees.
|
| Tech workers need to stop working for corporations they don't
| own, aren't seeing the profits of, and who will just throw them
| away at any moment. The solution are businesses in the form of
| employee-owned co-ops and organized labor.
| piyuv wrote:
| I'm in full support. But, you do realize the forum you're
| writing this in, right?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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.
| matchbok wrote:
| Or Spotify could have _not_ taken the risk a couple years ago
| and never hired them. Which is what would have happened in
| your scenario. (No dynamism)
|
| Businesses take risks. Part of that includes hiring people
| for things that may not work out. It's really not that hard.
|
| And "fuck-over"? Please. 5 months of salary with no work?
| Actual working class people would go nuts for that. Get a
| reality check bud.
| switch007 wrote:
| It's unfortunately common when financial end of year is around
| the same time.
|
| Announced now, people can at least try to scale back Christmas
| and NYE plans if necessary.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| How many people will be getting told they're part of it? I
| would suspect this will be hanging over their heads as an
| unknown element. Is it even possible for HR to manage off-
| boarding 17% of the company within a month?
| switch007 wrote:
| From the article:
|
| > Earlier today, CEO Daniel Ek shared the following note
| about the company's organizational changes with all Spotify
| employees.
|
| > ...
|
| > you will receive a calendar invite within the next two
| hours from HR for a one-on-one conversation. These meetings
| will take place before the end of the day on Tuesday
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| I saw that but I honestly don't think it's possible for
| HR to handle about 1,500 off-boarding meetings within 2
| days.
| apwell23 wrote:
| Those meetings are just formality. your fate is already
| sealed.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| Exactly a formality, something that has to be done. How
| are they going to handle that in 48 hours? To me, it's a
| sign that some people get to know straight away and some
| will find out later.
| maxehmookau wrote:
| Something I'm sure their CEO will do out of kindness and
| solidarity. /s
|
| How depressing.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| 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.
| toboche wrote:
| I wonder what amount of money will be saved doing these layoffs
| and how that compares to the overall spending of the company,
| given that the content streaming rights are probably a huge (the
| largest?) expense for the business.
| ath3nd wrote:
| It's about appearing efficient to the investors and therefore
| bumping the stock price and giving a payout to the few big
| stockholdets, rather than real efficiency. They go through a
| round of this routinely now, it seems, the letter is more or
| less the same as what he sent during last year, only
| percentages of laid off are different. That new version that
| ChatGPT generated made it more fluffy than last time.
|
| If they were worried about efficiency, they would not have
| grossly over hired during covid. That's why we need unions.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| Yep. Business theater. It's about stepping on the necks of
| working people to suppress wages and "teach them a lesson"
| they probably won't learn.
| matchbok wrote:
| That's.... not how things work. (Maybe on DSA Twitter, but
| not in the real world lol)
| ath3nd wrote:
| 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.
| matchbok wrote:
| Well, the US has the best companies and most innovative
| tech for a reason. Spotify is an outlier - Europe just
| doesn't compare.
| ath3nd wrote:
| 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.
| toboche wrote:
| That's exactly why I'm wondering about the overall
| improvement these layoffs will make for the business as a
| whole. From what this blog post is saying, it could be just
| applying the tactics most of the industry is following at the
| moment, no to stay behind the others.
| ath3nd wrote:
| 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 :)
| jamesblonde wrote:
| Why did this drop off the front page after a couple of mins?
| Loads of people seem interested. @dang ?
| rapsey wrote:
| 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.
| ryanSrich wrote:
| The upvote to comment ratio is off (too many comments and not
| enough upvotes), which is a negative signal to the HN
| algorithm.
| xer wrote:
| The elephant in the room: Will Spotify survive the coming wave of
| generative AI audio content? Wasn't any mentioning on that in the
| letter.
|
| Seems to me like they would need to ditch a lot of silly
| investments like original content, platform engineering on
| Kubernetes and scaled agile which together carry costs in the
| range of $100s millions, to free up resources to battle new
| disruptive technologies.
| dvngnt_ wrote:
| I would think so, people want to listen to swift and drake not
| some ML song with no relevance.
| confidantlake wrote:
| Tbh I would rather listen to a ML song than drake. At least
| the ML song would sound less robotic.
| jaymzcampbell wrote:
| 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.
| wombat-man wrote:
| Sure, but they're also probably planning work for 2024. They
| may just figure they have more people than they need at the
| moment.
| badcppdev wrote:
| 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.
| danpalmer wrote:
| 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.
| cupofjoakim wrote:
| For what it's worth Spotify is the most popular podcast
| platform in the US, with 25% of the userbase:
| https://explodingtopics.com/blog/podcast-
| listeners#podcast-p...
|
| I'd say that gamble in particular worked. Not so sure others
| will though, audio books feels like it will be a dud.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| 25% market share is a bit lackluster, though?
|
| 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.
| cupofjoakim wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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.
| SahAssar wrote:
| This whole subthread is about podcasts, and in that space
| apple was pretty early (2005 in itunes, 2012 as a
| standalone app) and spotify was very late.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Oops, I missed that distinction. Thanks for correction.
| badcppdev wrote:
| 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.
| anon23432343 wrote:
| 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.
| jamespo wrote:
| how much difference does lossless make on the typical
| headphones in use with mobile devices?
| threeseed wrote:
| People also use Apple Music, Shopify etc on non-mobile
| devices as well as IEMs on mobile.
|
| And for those lossless is a massive difference.
| BytesAndGears wrote:
| 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...
| anon23432343 wrote:
| Apple is probably also fine tuning there music to there
| products.
| anon23432343 wrote:
| 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.
| politelemon wrote:
| 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.
| joegahona wrote:
| It made none for me, even with $400 corded headphones.
|
| I recently ditched both Apple Music and Spotify and am
| using Youtube Music, which comes with Youtube Premium.
| TwentyPosts wrote:
| Were these blind tests?
| anon23432343 wrote:
| 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.
|
| Sony xm4 as headphones.
| gardenhedge wrote:
| The Joe Rogan experience definitely worked for Both Spotify and
| Joe
| madeofpalk wrote:
| You think Spotify actually made money from it? They seem to
| be pulling back from Podcasts...
| l1tany11 wrote:
| 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?
|
| 9000 employees and couldn't get playback to work...
| Neil44 wrote:
| 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.
| maxglute wrote:
| Should have fired 80% of their employees years ago when service
| was reasonably feature complete. Not that I don't sympathize with
| people getting laid off, but feels like past a certain point,
| more heads changes products faster than can be fixed, and
| sometimes moving fast degrades what shouldn't have been changed
| in the first place. NPR acquisition drama aside, pocketcast has
| like 25 employees that makes the service slightly better every
| year while fixing obvious bugs.
|
| Sometimes I don't understand how jumping from winamp to spotify
| goes from a handful to 10000 employees. Winamp + audiogalaxy (ah
| memories) probably covers 90% of spotify use case with probably
| 10 engineers, then just get some suckers to curate playlists for
| free.
| danpalmer wrote:
| What do you think the employees do?
|
| I imagine there's a big team dedicated to getting inventory on
| the service through negotiations with music producers around
| the world. You'd need to keep them to continue expanding,
| adding newly produced music, and re-negotiating expiring deals.
|
| There will be a large editorial team producing playlists,
| curation, tuning the algorithm with expertise, etc. That all
| needs to be localised and to cover lots of niche music tastes.
| That's also not evergreen content or work, it needs constant
| updates to remain relevant.
|
| Then there's international expansion and enabling the tech to
| work for more countries, more languages, more payment methods,
| more types of music publishing.
|
| Honestly, where do you get "80%"?
| maxglute wrote:
| >Honestly, where do you get "80%"?
|
| Lazy hyperbole and picked pareto 80%. Not remotely well
| calculated remark. Should have constrained comment to
| engineer/design team.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Well thanks for owning up to it!
|
| I agree that it feels like the product from an engineering
| perspective was "finished" a while ago, however when I
| think about it for a while I can come up with many things
| that will need ongoing engineering work. For example, bug
| fixes (no one ever finishes this), support for new
| devices/phones/smart speakers/TVs/cars, support for
| payments and authentication in new regions, scaling work to
| scale to users in more regions, reliability and operational
| work.
|
| And that's just the stuff that isn't about growing more. I
| think it's reasonable to expect that businesses want to
| grow, and this isn't always anti-consumer either, as it can
| result in services that appeal to more users and cost less.
| This means engineering work on the marketing funnel,
| onboarding, new markets like podcasts, and lots more.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| There's at least one team devoted to screwing up the
| homepage, pushing content that I don't want like podcasts.
| Will not miss them.
| maxglute wrote:
| 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.
| danpalmer wrote:
| 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.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Yet somehow they managed to do the impossible and add a
| "hide from Discover Weekly" button.
| ta1243 wrote:
| update users set "show_podcasts=0" where userid = 12345
| danpalmer wrote:
| If you think it through there is so much more to do here.
| This is the 3 person startup solution, but really doesn't
| get you much further than that.
| pradn wrote:
| For something as simple as a dismiss button for a
| particular promotion, it's reasonable to store the bit on
| device. This will work for mobile and desktop apps, which
| I assume are the vast majority of Spotify usage.
|
| Or they could invest in a generic "misc settings" column
| in their DB - to store random stuff like this in a blob.
| You could even query/index on them w/ something like
| Postgres's JSON support.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > For something as simple as a dismiss button for a
| particular promotion, it's reasonable to store the bit on
| device. This will work for mobile and desktop apps, which
| I assume are the vast majority of Spotify usage.
|
| No it isn't. When you "dismiss", the service needs to
| have a point of view (or UX to clarify) whether you want
| to dismiss it permanently or temporarily (I'm not in the
| mood for it right now).
|
| You also need to deal with the cases where someone
| accidentally hits the button.
|
| You also need to think about people who use multiple
| devices.
|
| Should the algo's now update to say you don't like
| podcasts? You don't like talk shows? You don't like
| podcasts with themes that Rogan covers - what themes
| would that be?
|
| etc.
| whoopsie wrote:
| This is not outside the realm of one sprint.
| pradn wrote:
| 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".
| maxglute wrote:
| 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.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> I want to dismiss Rogan as much as anyone, but I think
| this underestimates the complexity involved. It 's not
| just a button, it's what the button does,_
|
| This is the kind of statement that leads to people saying
| "Should have fired 80% of their employees years ago when
| service was reasonably feature complete." by making it
| sound like a big development team creates an unwieldy
| product then struggles to implement even the simplest of
| features.
|
| The button is absolutely not missing because of any
| technical difficulty implementing it. Spotify is already
| storing per-user preferences - and doing all sorts of
| algorithmic stuff to make smart recommendations and
| suchlike, all with the ability to scale.
|
| The button is missing for a business reason: They want
| their purchase of Rogan to be a success because they've
| spent a lot of money on it.
| refulgentis wrote:
| No, they're right: your understanding of each other
| diverges when you write "it's not because of any
| technical difficulty" --- correct, we all agree there.
| However, it is still difficult.
|
| Big companies have big processes and that, at least at
| Google, would have prevented this from happening for at
| least 12-18 months. Then those things aren't pursued
| because of A) the literal cost of getting that arranged
| over 18 months B) the individual's decision not to invest
| in beating their head against a wall for 18 months for
| something that'd be done in a week if leadership cared.
| Leadership does not care, so QED, it will not be a
| positive for your career.
|
| Things either get done because A) leadership cares and
| has skin in the game and everyone is afraid of getting in
| the way of whoever delivers B) leadership cares and will
| keep asking about it over and over again for a year or
| two or C) no one cares so no one will get in your way.
|
| That's also the crux of why things at Google go sideways.
| A) is only true over a year long cycle (I.e. you need to
| get to launch) B) people are afraid to do because it's
| hectoring and C) if no one cares its probably not much of
| a game changer anyway, there's no incentive to do it, and
| especially in FAANG's Efficiency/Focus(tm) era[^1^], you
| can actually get pretty easily brow-beaten for it by
| middle management. Then what are you going to do? Appeal
| to a VP that your manager and managers manager are big ol
| meanies?
|
| [^1^] I originally wrote error, which, lol
| michaelt wrote:
| _> Big companies have big processes and that, at least at
| Google, would have prevented this from happening for at
| least 12-18 months._
|
| Well gee, if all these software developers are making
| them _slower_ at software development, it sure sounds
| like they should have _fired 80% of their employees years
| ago when service was reasonably feature complete_.
| refulgentis wrote:
| It's not the software developers. Companies and processes
| aren't run by software developers. I wish you were more
| curious about the gap between your understanding and
| others, it'd be a much more enlightening discussion with
| your interlocution, as it stands, we keep circling back
| to "all companies with long launch lead times should fire
| 80% of their software engineers"
| michaelt wrote:
| danpalmer believes ads for Rogan can't be dismissed
| because of 'the complexity involved' in specific
| technical areas such as being scalable; providing a GDPR
| export; offering an undo option; and providing a
| comprehensible user experience.
|
| I would say questions like scalability and data exporting
| fall squarely upon the software development arm of the
| business; and _if_ they had chosen an architecture which
| made it hard for them to deliver value, that would
| reflect poorly on them.
|
| I am also arguing they probably _didn 't_ choose a bad
| architecture, because I don't think a technical issue is
| making it difficult to dismiss Rogan ads.
|
| It's far more likely this is the same as Youtube making
| it difficult to dismiss Shorts, and Amazon trying to
| trick you into a Prime subscription every time you check
| out: They've decided their strategy is to make a number
| go up, and your personal experience is less important to
| them than that strategy.
| rchaud wrote:
| > 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.
| bazmattaz wrote:
| Yep that's it. The same reason Netflix doesn't have a
| "hide this" button either
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| 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.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| From a user perspective, they shouldn't have added
| podcasts without the opt-out option
| eddtries wrote:
| That's a crazy reason to drop using Spotify
| constantly wrote:
| People have different priorities. It didn't cause me to
| drop music subscriptions, but did cause me to switch to
| Apple Music.
| ghaff wrote:
| Not that Apple Music is God's gift to UI, but I prefer to
| keep my podcasts and my music separate and I don't want
| recommendations to be pushed on me.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| 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.
| sdflhasjd wrote:
| I didn't switch because of Joe Rogan, but Spotify kept
| changing the UI and at some point it got so annoying to
| browse music over the crappy podcasts being shoved in my
| face that I switched to Tidal.
| metabagel wrote:
| I felt like Tidal didn't have as large a catalog as
| Spotify? What do you think?
| sdflhasjd wrote:
| I think the catalogue is just as good, but searching can
| be more difficult.
| 10729287 wrote:
| Some people just put their money where their mouth is
| maxglute wrote:
| I stopped my sub after Rogan AND Peterson pinned on my
| homescreen, and it just wasn't worth any drama it could
| stir with how often spotify is passively open. I like me
| the occasional Rogan, but Peterson is not someone I want
| to associate with, especially where I am, who I'm
| generally with, even accidentally. Like it's just dumb
| shit design for no good reason.
|
| It was enough of an issue that I remember multiple
| support threads topics at the time.
|
| Switched to plexamp for a while. Half a year later, I'm
| free riding off someones spare family plan slot.
| whiddershins wrote:
| Are you saying in your social circle if someone sees
| Jordan Peterson on your Spotify Home Screen you are
| concerned this would create "drama?"
| J_Shelby_J wrote:
| 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.
| gardenhedge wrote:
| Sounds like you work in a toxic workplace
| coldpie wrote:
| I would definitely give someone the side-eye if I saw
| Peterson or Rogan on their phone, yeah.
| hereme888 wrote:
| 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'm ready for the downvotes.
| coldpie wrote:
| 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.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Peterson's podcast is in the top 30. Some people live
| very siloed lives.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| 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.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > 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.
| jiveturkey42 wrote:
| Same reason I stopped buying Apple products - they shoved
| U2 into my iTunes library
| the_snooze wrote:
| 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.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> That's a crazy reason to drop using Spotify_
|
| That's like saying people dropping Windows 11 for pushing
| Candy Crush and TikTok in the start menu si crazy. Is it
| really crazy? I don't think so.
|
| If I'm a paying customer I want to be treated with
| respect. If you keep making my UX worse to push your own
| agenda I _WILL_ drop you for the HDD of "definitely
| legit" MP3s ready to go.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > That's like saying people dropping Windows 11 for
| pushing Candy Crush and TikTok in the start menu si
| crazy.
|
| That's not the right comparison.
|
| You don't buy the OS for entertainment recommendations
| and listening/viewing/playing/reading.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I'm probably not the common usecase but I don't use
| Spotify for recommendations either.
|
| I hate recommendation engines in software. One of the
| first things I always turn off when I install Spotify is
| the "When we finish your playlist we'll just keep playing
| similar music we think you'll like" option.
|
| All I use Spotify for is to save myself the trouble of
| maintaining a media server and tracking down all the
| music I like to put on it
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> 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.
| epicide wrote:
| By itself, sure. It's a litmus test of sorts.
|
| It's kinda like how I judge most for-profit businesses
| based on the checkout experience. _Usually_ (there are
| certainly valid exceptions), the process of me giving
| them money is what I expect to be the _best_ experience I
| will ever have with that company.
|
| Am I going to refuse to shop at a store simply because
| nobody cared about a payment process? No, not unless it's
| particularly painful or damaging to me in some way.
|
| However, it's certainly a red flag and a warning that the
| rest of my interactions with them aren't likely to be
| better.
|
| Same with the case here. If the landing page for a
| service product is so heavily pushing particular content
| in place of actually being useful for them, that's a
| pretty big red flag.
|
| tl;dr by itself, it's a silly reason to drop it, but it
| can definitely reveal where business priorities currently
| lie.
| AdamN wrote:
| Why not? I don't have time for many ads and will go to
| great lengths to get rid of them - especially ones I
| don't like. With Spotify this is even easier because
| there are a number of replacements available.
| eddtries wrote:
| 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?
| daveoc64 wrote:
| Spotify's home page is full of ads - even for premium
| users.
|
| https://artists.spotify.com/en/showcase
| sercand wrote:
| I dropped Spotify when they started to push more podcasts
| on my home feed as well.
| rchaud wrote:
| When you overpay massively for IP, you have no choice but
| to shove it down people's throats in the hope that even
| 1% decide to subscribe.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| That sounds like a sunk-cost fallacy to me.
|
| Note: For all I know, they really could be making that
| error. Or perhaps someone inside Spotify feels the need
| to make the Rogan investment at least break even,
| consequences be damned.
| butlike wrote:
| Yeah but the dismiss button has to be directly tethered
| to the machine learning analytics that is also tied to
| the retention team, so if too many people trigger it, the
| retention team is alerted to a potential user-retention
| risk. You need to write the API to hook into those two
| services, then make sure you have benchmarks before your
| pull-request will get approved.
|
| You could do this, but I think the profile pictures would
| look better with rounded edges.
| s3p wrote:
| They're not leaving. 17% of the staff doesn't include the
| entirety of the curation team.
| apwell23 wrote:
| Yea I worked at groupon when it was taking off and we had
| around 200 sales ppl calling up and negotiating deals with
| local business.
|
| Everyone back then used to ask me the same question: Why does
| groupon have 500 ppl, isnt' it just a wordpress site.
| dmd wrote:
| People who make CRUD sites think everything is just a CRUD
| site.
| Gooblebrai wrote:
| Engineering-bias at its best. Thinking about the product
| complexity but not about the business
| makestuff wrote:
| It is a shame for Chicago that groupon didn't continue to
| find success. I really think that if they had continued to
| grow the Chicago tech scene would be significantly larger
| than it is today.
| boiler_up800 wrote:
| Absolutely agree. I'm not sure I can name another name
| brand Chicago tech company, which is devastating for
| their startup and venture ecosystem.
| tempusalaria wrote:
| Citadel.
|
| Chicago has been a big centre for developers for finance
| companies for a long time. Hedge Funds, Market Makers,
| Asset Managers etc.
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| Citadel is moving to Miami because Chicago government
| sucks - the move was due to "riots, an employee stabbed,
| and the attempted hijacking of his Ken Griffin's car"
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/ken-griffin-citadel-
| moving-h...
| butlike wrote:
| Yeah, Miami is going to be way better for crime...
| abtinf wrote:
| Especially if they had succeeded in building the dome.
| butlike wrote:
| 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.
| apwell23 wrote:
| Exactly! Lefty did groupon dirty.
| aerhardt wrote:
| 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...
| mrkeen wrote:
| > What do you think the employees do?
|
| Product stand-up, agile stand-up, team fika, cross-team fika,
| town hall, team activity, tribe activity, one-on-one, backlog
| grooming, team retro, incident post-mortem, ping pong, live
| music.
|
| If you do scrape together a few minutes to get part of the
| codebase into your head (despite the open-floor-plan
| chatter), you've got no way to trigger that bug you think you
| saw.
|
| But persevere anyway and diagnose it. Oh it looks like it's
| happening in someone else's microservice. File a JIRA? Bring
| it up at the next meeting? Try a different fix anyway. Happy
| with the fix? Wait in pull-request limbo until it's sorted.
| Release it straight into prod? You could bring down prod...
| Maybe you didn't really see that bug after all. Coffee time!
| smus wrote:
| I think you're missing the point that coding isn't the only
| type of job
| mrkeen wrote:
| Do you think that the non-coders have more time to do
| their actual work than the coders?
| danpalmer wrote:
| 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.
| mrkeen wrote:
| > 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)
| dbbk wrote:
| A tiny part of Spotify's headcount is product &
| engineering.
| mrkeen wrote:
| See my sibling comment. Non-coders are just as capable as
| coders at doing non-work.
|
| This site says 6000 engineers. That is enormous in both
| absolute terms and "as a tiny part" of Spotify.
|
| https://thenewstack.io/how-spotlify-adopted-platform-
| enginee...
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| 6000 is beyond ridiculous.
|
| It's a media player with a CDN. They should have _at
| most_ 100 engineers.
| NickC25 wrote:
| Spotify had a large headcount.
|
| Let's look at some of your examples and see where things can
| logically be cut.
|
| > _I imagine there 's a big team dedicated to getting
| inventory on the service through negotiations with music
| producers around the world._
|
| This can be streamlined considerably through standardized
| contracts. I'd wager 90% of the inventory that said team gets
| is from niche artists, independent artists or small labels.
| Very few artists actually have the clout or resources to
| negotiate their own deals with Spotify. That's sort of the
| point of having executives - to handle the Taylor Swifts of
| the world. Your local band, rapper, singer-songwriter or
| producer doesn't matter to Spotify.
|
| Have a clear and straightforward tier system for
| compensation. You get a billion streams a year? You get $X.
| You get 10,000 streams a year? You get $Y.
|
| > _There will be a large editorial team producing playlists,
| curation, tuning the algorithm with expertise, etc. That all
| needs to be localised and to cover lots of niche music
| tastes. That 's also not evergreen content or work, it needs
| constant updates to remain relevant._
|
| You don't need a large team to curate playlists when you can
| have users curate playlists. In fact, _they already do_. You
| don 't need a huge localization team either. Users already
| take care of the legwork for you. Same goes for algorithm
| tuning.
|
| > _Then there 's international expansion and enabling the
| tech to work for more countries, more languages, more payment
| methods, more types of music publishing._
|
| Spotify is kinda already there in terms of international
| expansion. Anywhere they aren't already, they probably won't
| get there for political reasons (such as China).
|
| More languages? Sure, but that doesn't require a massive
| team. Fortunately, there are a few dominant languages around
| the world, and Spotify has those covered.
|
| More payment methods? Let the creators of those methods
| handle that - that's their job. Credit Card companies or
| banks or whatever don't create their own payment platform
| tech and just say "now it's yours to try to implement", they
| have entire teams dedicated to that.
|
| More types of music publishing? Like what? There's only so
| many methods of publishing music, and I'd wager there's going
| to be very little (if any) innovation there for a while.
| Spotify doesn't really distribute any other forms of
| published music besides digital streams. They aren't selling
| records or CDs, are they?
|
| EDIT: you could also say Spotify has vastly overspent on the
| likes of Joe Rogan, no matter how popular he is. $200 million
| dollars to a company that isn't very profitable, no matter
| how large, is just bad business. He's worth nowhere close to
| $200 million.
| piva00 wrote:
| > Sometimes I don't understand how jumping from winamp to
| spotify goes from a handful to 10000 employees. Winamp +
| audiogalaxy (ah memories) probably covers 90% of spotify use
| case with probably 10 engineers, then just get some suckers to
| curate playlists for free.
|
| The complexity is not the player, it's the whole business...
| Winamp didn't have recommendations, tack on another 100-200
| people working on data to surface those. There are close to a
| 100 markets being offered content with licencing deals, each
| with different regulations.
|
| There are internal platforms, infrastructure, development, each
| platform requires team(s) to maintain, and develop them.
|
| What's the size of the largest tech company (with a single
| product) that you've worked at? Just so I know how to translate
| how larger organisations work to a worldview that you have
| experience with.
| maxglute wrote:
| No need, I was being flippant. I don't work in tech but dealt
| with large orgs. Broad point is, by all means, have your
| headcount for signing labels, localization, maintaining
| physical infra. But past a certain amount of brains and you
| get feature/vision creep that starts degrading core product.
| Where/when that point is of course highly subjective.
|
| But how many employees does a music streaming service need? I
| don't know, but last I read, Valve had less than 500
| employees on everything including Steam before they ramp up
| headcount for hardware. Did spotify need 20x more? Maybe
| nature of music streaming needs 9000 more employees to deal
| with labels. But my uninformed opinion is, probably not.
| Closi wrote:
| Well I just googled and Valve has 1,139 employees, and
| Spotify will now have 7,800 - It's nowhere near 20x.
|
| Still a big gap, although I suspect they are very different
| offerings and companies. Differences include:
|
| * Spotify needs to sell ads (to support it's free tier).
| This requires engineering and people to sell the ads.
|
| * Spotify is in a more competitive market than Steam (who
| have a nearly de-facto monopoly) so more
| advertising/marketing effort is required.
|
| * Interfacing with the entire global music industry takes
| time and resource.
|
| There may also be differences to the extent these companies
| outsource and use contractors which could make it more
| difficult to see actual headcount.
| pie420 wrote:
| Spotify is also a de facto monopoly.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| A monopoly of what? A few people's podcasts?
| piva00 wrote:
| Spotify has ~30% of the market, Apple Music, Tencent, and
| Amazon have each ~13%, YouTube Music another ~9%.
|
| That's far from a monopoly...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Didn't even know Tencent had a music streaming service,
| but their numbers look amazing:
|
| 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.
| butlike wrote:
| 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.
| tarsinge wrote:
| If a company needs to fire people to prevent a product from
| degrading then it's too late the company culture is rotten to
| its core.
| Ajay-p wrote:
| 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.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| At every company I've worked at, there are things we want to do
| that nearly everybody think are a good idea. But we can't do
| them all, because we have limited capital. So we have to be
| very strategic.
|
| Spotify has developed a huge surface area, because they are
| attempting to be the one-stop shop for all things audio. The
| thesis is that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts,
| and that's what they're selling to investors. That means there
| are countless bets they could be making at any one time, to
| compete with everybody else out there.
|
| For a company of Spotify's stature, when capital is cheap, they
| can raise the money to do all the things, all at once. They
| don't have to make prioritization choices. Usually this means
| many dozens of teams, which each seem pretty lean if you zoom
| in. Like, I'm guessing there's a team of 3ish developing the
| in-app lyrics experience, or something like that. The scale is
| in how many of these bets are going at once.
|
| The capital markets have changed, and now Spotify (like many
| others) has to constrain its bets. The thesis hasn't changed,
| but their capacity to try to prove it out isn't as limitless as
| before.
| varjag wrote:
| 10000 employees with let's say 40% overhead translates into
| 2000 3-ish lean teams. Certainly some would be far larger
| than 3 person but even then. Is Spotify surface that huge
| really?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| 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.
| varjag wrote:
| 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.
| esskay wrote:
| > 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.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| 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.
| StevePerkins wrote:
| 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.
| digger495 wrote:
| > there are things we want to do that nearly everybody think
| are a good idea.
|
| 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.
| golergka wrote:
| Do you think your social circle is representative enough to
| use as evidence for Spotify's business decisions?
| BhavdeepSethi wrote:
| I wanted podcasts in Spotify, but you don't know me. Sample
| bias?
| piva00 wrote:
| 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.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Huh? Lots of people wanted podcasts in Spotify. Why
| wouldn't they? Podcasts are hugely popular.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| I don't want podcasts in my Spotify, but it makes sense to
| me why Spotify wants to do it. Or rather, the opportunity
| they see.
| yibg wrote:
| No idea where the 80% or 90% coverage comes from, but let's
| assume the numbers are right and you get 90% with just 20% of
| the current staff. Spotify has revenue of 13 billion a year.
| 10% of that is a bit more than a billion. Spotify has 9000 -
| 10000 employees, let's round up and say 10,000 employees. If
| they can get an extra 1 billion at a cost of 8,000 employees it
| still might be worth it if they can spend 100k per employee per
| year. Doable for a mix of roles and geographies.
|
| At some scales of business, spending a lot more to get
| incremental gains can be worth it.
| Solvency wrote:
| What in the absolute fuck are 10000 people doing at Spotify?
| Really try to crunch those numbers mentally here. It's
| insane.
| kredd wrote:
| 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.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Their engineer staff numbers are just silly.
| miyuru wrote:
| Spotify also has studios in multiple locations.
|
| https://spotifystudios.com/
| bittermandel wrote:
| Interesting timing considering the on-going process of
| unionizing.
| u320 wrote:
| I don't see how it's related. If anything this will accelerate
| that.
| benterix wrote:
| 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.
| pdimitar wrote:
| But why do they have so many in the first place?
|
| 9000 employees. My gods.
|
| What are all these people doing?!
| izacus wrote:
| Maintaining a large worldwide music/podcast delivery platform.
| What do you think they're doing?
| steve1977 wrote:
| Not OP, but I really don't know why you would need _that_
| many people.
| Shaanie wrote:
| 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.
| steve1977 wrote:
| That would maybe explain 500-1000 people.
| izacus wrote:
| What do you base your estimates on? What do you know
| about Spotify's business and what it takes it to run
| sustainably?
| sligor wrote:
| Well, whatsapp reached 1 billion user with only around 50
| employees
| izacus wrote:
| Last I checked it's not a music delivery platform.
| Maxion wrote:
| Clearly not working on the core functionality of the app - heh.
|
| This seems to be some megatrend with the big tech companies.
| Hire on ~10k staff, ignore your core features, ???, profit.
| pdimitar wrote:
| 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?)
| sligor wrote:
| > I can't imagine the whole thing can't be done with
| between 30 to 50 engineers in total.
|
| 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
| em500 wrote:
| 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.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| 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
| raverbashing wrote:
| > 5-6 for the backend, 3-4 DevOps, maybe some more for the
| various frontends... say, 20?
|
| 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.
| thriftwy wrote:
| 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.
| n_ary wrote:
| 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.
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| It is difficult to understand if this is satire or not.
| pdimitar wrote:
| 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.
|
| And apparently Spotify agrees.
| Shaanie wrote:
| 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.
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| _Why would it be a satire_
|
| Because it's like a cliche 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.
| azan_ wrote:
| 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.
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| Spotify has a lot of front ends to manage, I think more
| than 20 would be required.
|
| 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.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Hm, solid point, thank you.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| Let us not forget:
|
| TVs, Wifi connected speakers, home theater systems,
| Chromecast etc.
| creshal wrote:
| Spotify uses Chromium embedded for their desktop clients
| and webviews for their mobile clients, so that's largely
| one codebase for 6+ clients.
|
| 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.
| Shaanie wrote:
| 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.
| pdimitar wrote:
| 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.
| Shaanie wrote:
| 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.
| pdimitar wrote:
| 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.
| Shaanie wrote:
| 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.
| sevagh wrote:
| >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)?
| izacus wrote:
| Also you just need rsync for dropbox, right? :P
| 3mums wrote:
| 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.
| c-fe wrote:
| 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
| sigilis wrote:
| 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.
| snoopsnopp wrote:
| 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
| objclxt wrote:
| > 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
|
| They don't have 9000 developers, they have 9000 employees.
| phaer wrote:
| 9000 employees, not developers alone.
| stuartleigh wrote:
| They don't have 9000 developers, they have 9000 staff.
| happytiger wrote:
| 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.
|
| It's a LOT of humans for streaming music service.
| oblio wrote:
| Turns out, more people use a streaming music service (and
| frankly... really care about it), than they do about the
| Apollo moon landing.
|
| 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.
| izacus wrote:
| 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?
| happytiger wrote:
| 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.
| izacus wrote:
| 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.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> 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.
| dagw wrote:
| 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.
| creshal wrote:
| 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.)
| lijok wrote:
| > What are all these people doing?!
|
| Ensuring Spotify can smoothly operate globally
| pdimitar wrote:
| I can accept that... if it's said how exactly.
| lijok wrote:
| 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?
| pdimitar wrote:
| I am not outraged. I am baffled. And yes, if somebody is
| willing to give a bit more details, they can be
| informative (and a few people already did).
| robin_reala wrote:
| 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
| pdimitar wrote:
| Pretty enlightening, thank you.
| lijok wrote:
| You can start by looking through their job board
| throughout time to understand the kinds of positions a
| company like Spotify need to fill in order to operate
| globally: https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/htt
| ps://www.life...
| objclxt wrote:
| > I can accept that... if it's said how exactly.
|
| 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.
| n_ary wrote:
| > 9000 employees. My gods.
|
| 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.
| bottled_poe wrote:
| "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.
| figassis wrote:
| Each feature, integration (maybe with each publisher), country,
| etc is likely its own microsservice and infra and devops and
| team.
| poisonborz wrote:
| 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.
| izacus wrote:
| > 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.
| poisonborz wrote:
| 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.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| 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.
|
| Maybe that's a bad comparison, but if so, why?
| dustedcodes wrote:
| 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... ???
| rapsey wrote:
| I listen to podcasts: While doing pretty much anything in the
| house, while driving. Turns out that is a pretty sizeable chunk
| of time.
| syrgian wrote:
| 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.
| dustedcodes wrote:
| > 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.
| bobdvb wrote:
| I probably watch more YouTube than SVOD (e.g. Netflix).
|
| Plus the family sub for YT Premium is well worth it. But I do
| sub to Amazon Music not Spotify because of Alexa.
| troupo wrote:
| > 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.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > So assuming that probably most people subscribe to YouTube
| Premium
|
| Why would you assume this?
| goodluckchuck wrote:
| There were 1,600 people at Spotify?
| amatix wrote:
| > 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.
| sho_hn wrote:
| I'm also curious what they need 10k people for. What of the
| business is so labor-intensive?
| bradyat wrote:
| Every Spotify wrapped is put together by hand
| donkeysquid wrote:
| I had a good chuckle at this
| hoseja wrote:
| I would like to say "curating the library" but it's
| probably license paperwork and negotiations with the
| rightsholders.
| sho_hn wrote:
| Probably those require a lot of local branch offices for
| legal reasons, so that's a lot of HR/admin overhead.
| bjord wrote:
| the constant interface overhauls they do, probably
| notTooFarGone wrote:
| I'd guess managing labels, podcasters, marketing & ads +
| moderation takes a huge chunk there.
| osobo wrote:
| 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?
| mattacular wrote:
| Product sprints aren't going to run themselves
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| yea seriosuly.. they're desktop app is electron. its not
| like their individual apps are getting special attention.
|
| imho, I'd pay extra for a good NATIVE spotify client for
| the mac
| capableweb wrote:
| > they're desktop app is electron
|
| 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).
| user_named wrote:
| No you wouldn't
| alexpotato wrote:
| 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.
| unglaublich wrote:
| 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.
| blooop wrote:
| From the article:
|
| 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.
| mahmoudhossam wrote:
| 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.
| deburo wrote:
| Are you not aware how dire inflation and the very high interest
| rate make the current situation?
| WUMBOWUMBO wrote:
| Hasn't inflation gone down to ~3%?
| COGlory wrote:
| Has it? Nothing in my life except gasoline has gotten any
| cheaper.
|
| Edit: I misread the comment. I am aware of the difference
| between rates and absolutes.
| ahtihn wrote:
| Why would it get cheaper with a low inflation rate?
|
| Low inflation rate means stuff get more expensive slower.
| It's still getting more expensive.
| dagw wrote:
| 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.
| namtab00 wrote:
| that's not what "less inflation" means
| u320 wrote:
| The other mistake you made was assuming that your
| personal experience is valid for the economy as a whole.
| COGlory wrote:
| No, I made it quite clear it was a question.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Sweden's current inflation rate is 4.2%
|
| https://www.riksbank.se/en-gb/monetary-policy/the-
| inflation-...
| deelowe wrote:
| 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?
| myspy wrote:
| 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.
| deelowe wrote:
| Nonsense. You didn't address my point...
|
| 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.
| myspy wrote:
| Well vice versa great answer.
|
| 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.
| deelowe wrote:
| 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.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| 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.
| deelowe wrote:
| 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...
| hotpotamus wrote:
| 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.
| deelowe wrote:
| 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
| hotpotamus wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| How much more money do you want Spotify to lose?
|
| 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.
| myspy wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Do you have a specific claim or question, or is this an
| emotional response anytime employees are let go?
|
| I already showed you that shareholders have been losing
| money for 5.5 years (while employees were being paid).
| myspy wrote:
| Yeah this emotional because it makes no sense. The system
| appears to be not working.
| gretch wrote:
| The system literally is working. Spotify still exists and
| you can get music there. Most employees kept their job.
|
| The system that's not working is literally the one in
| your head. Literally, your imagined ideals sign zero
| paychecks and add no value.
| nemo44x wrote:
| 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).
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| If they keep running losses, _every_ employee loses their
| jobs. The company is losing money.
| gottorf wrote:
| > A riskless investment in sp500
|
| 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".
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It is my tongue-in-cheek way of referring to the belief
| that the US federal government will ensure the broad
| market does not stay down for long.
| Marazan wrote:
| Given that the major shareholders are the big music
| rights holders which is one of Spotifies major costs
| shareholder have done alright.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| This is not true. They must be very insignificant
| shareholders (less than 1%).
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SPOT/holders/
| Marazan wrote:
| Thabks for that. I've not been paying attention - the
| major labels have all sold (almost all) their stakes over
| the last few years.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1639920/000119312
| 518...
| broast wrote:
| I tend to think the overhiring was not a "mistake" but
| planned. They still get to keep all the intellectual output
| of the people they let go.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > 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.
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SPOT/spotify-techn...
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Have you looked at the financials? The company runs net losses,
| every year. Losses are not a "massive cake", they are a
| "massive hole".
| saaaaaam wrote:
| The labels are definitely getting a massive slice of the cake
| - and recently pushed for more.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Looks like Benn Jordan's analysis on how Spotify will fail is
| slowly starting to materialize:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDfNRWsMRsU
| jorlow wrote:
| Would love a tl;dw. How does he predict the fail will
| materialize?
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Here's what Bard says:
|
| _" 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."_
| 4death4 wrote:
| But where is the prediction on how Spotify will fail?
| mritchie712 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| you can't lose money indefinitely
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Increasing interest rates.
| arghwhat wrote:
| "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).
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| In their annual report[1] Spotify specify they make about
| 10 times more revenue from premium than ads, so that's a
| pretty big blow to their thesis.
|
| [1]: https://s29.q4cdn.com/175625835/files/doc_financials/2
| 022/ar... (p. 51)
| laborcontract wrote:
| It's incredible how bard hallucinated THIS ENTIRE SUMMARY
| and not a single person realizes it.
| jasode wrote:
| _> Here's what Bard says: [...]_
|
| 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).
| hyperbovine wrote:
| 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.
| alexpotato wrote:
| 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.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > 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.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| > I'm not sure this is working that well for Netflix.
|
| Netflix is pretty much the only service that is
| profitable, so it is.
|
| Exclusivity works. Netflix made it work pretty well.
| Spotify can't.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| conradfr wrote:
| Do artists want to be signed by a label that will
| probably limit their exposure to only one streaming
| service?
| dagw wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| nemo44x wrote:
| 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.
| avereveard wrote:
| 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.
| oblio wrote:
| 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.
|
| Turns out, cartel >>> aggregator.
| konart wrote:
| https://www.summarize.tech/www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDfNRWsMR.
| ..
|
| 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.
| hasoleju wrote:
| I'm a heavy user of spotify. Almost everyone I know uses it
| daily. I don't understand why they are not able to turn this
| much engagement into profit.
| glimshe wrote:
| 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.
| oblio wrote:
| Anyone remember Grooveshark? Great service :-D
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| 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.
| nemo44x wrote:
| 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.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| 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.
| j-krieger wrote:
| 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.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| Their workforce is a fairly small part of their costs.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://s29.q4cdn.com/175625835/files/doc_financials/2023
| /q3...
| Mindwipe wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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.
| j-krieger wrote:
| 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.
| capableweb wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Such as?
| azemetre wrote:
| Reducing operation costs (labor), selling valuable assets
| are two that immediately come to mind.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Both of those result in increasing profits.
| azemetre wrote:
| My bad, I misread what the person you were replying to
| asked.
| capableweb wrote:
| "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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Look at Tesla's net income:
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSLA/tesla/net-
| inc...
|
| That is not hype, that is cash.
| capableweb wrote:
| Right, so you're saying that Tesla is a company that
| would never do anything to increase the share price,
| besides trying to increase profits?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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.
| unicornmama wrote:
| Net income is not cash.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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.
| gumballindie wrote:
| > Almost everyone I know uses it daily.
|
| 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.
| altdataseller wrote:
| Same, most people I know use Apple Music while others use
| YouTube Premium
| emmet wrote:
| I am one of the 8 people in the UK that use Apple Music.
| Literally everyone uses Spotify outside of America.
| gumballindie wrote:
| 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.
| emmet wrote:
| 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.
| gumballindie wrote:
| > that most people in Europe are even aware of
|
| 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.
| pavlov wrote:
| 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".)
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| And here I am with my "definitely legit" collection of
| MP3s I keep on my phone and PC, played on Winamp 2.95.
| josefresco wrote:
| Counter-Counterpoint: I got two teens in (American public)
| high school - they claim "everyone" uses Spotify and
| grumble about our YouTube Music/Premium subscription.
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| Kbelicius wrote:
| > I don't understand why they are not able to turn this much
| engagement into profit.
|
| Because any growth in profits that spotify sees will quickly
| be eaten by music rights holders.
| infecto wrote:
| 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.
| realusername wrote:
| > I don't understand why they are not able to turn this much
| engagement into profit.
|
| 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.
| bazmattaz wrote:
| A huge amount of revenue goes into paying royalties
| mseidl wrote:
| There was another musician that went on his own, but his
| overall sales are less but he's making more.
|
| 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.
| nalekberov wrote:
| A few days ago I received "Pay one month, get 3 months" promotion
| (disclaimer: Accepted). That explains the picture.
| rodlette wrote:
| I'm embarrassed to admit that despite having had Spotify for
| years, my music tastes didn't change much.
|
| I switched back to albums, and can thankfully pick clients that
| suit my taste.
|
| * https://gitlab.com/souch/SMP for Android
|
| * https://apps.gnome.org/Amberol/ for desktop Linux
|
| Beets and rsync manage tags and distribution.
| oblio wrote:
| > I'm embarrassed to admit that despite having had Spotify for
| years, my music tastes didn't change much.
|
| Don't be embarrassed, that's probably most people.
|
| We like what we like.
| ghaff wrote:
| Napster and, later, streaming caused me to experiment a bit
| more. But although I picked up various artists and genres
| over the years I'm still pretty rooted in what I liked during
| college and early adult years. If my access to streaming were
| cut off tomorrow, I'd be pretty content with my mostly ripped
| from CD music library.
| bluesounddirect wrote:
| Finally.
| byyll wrote:
| Can someone explain to me why a company that is about streaming
| mp3s needs 9500 employees? That just sounds extremely inefficient
| to me. They don't even have native desktop apps.
| elAhmo wrote:
| They definitely don't need that many, hence the layoffs.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| All of these hp tech start-ups/scale-ups overhired when money
| was cheap to signal growth and confidence to investors, even if
| they didn't need that many workers, nobody cared, as long as
| "line goes up".
| lupire wrote:
| This is nonsense. They hired people to grow users, usage
| revenue, not to brag about employee counts. Companies brag
| about maximizes revenue per employee.
| cbozeman wrote:
| No, that makes sense _to you_.
|
| I grew up with someone who is now in the C-Suite of one of
| America's largest corporations - a company that has been in
| the Fortune 100 for decades. He has bounced from
| directorship to C-Suite in Fortune 500s for the past 12
| years, and I asked him about this phenomenon over cigars
| about six months ago, he said this:
|
| "cbozeman, you have to understand these people. Most of
| these people making these decisions are raging narcissists.
| What do you think sounds better?
|
| 'I managed and led 500 people.'
|
| 'I managed and led 5000 people.'
|
| And when you compound that on top of essentially free
| money, and then you also throw in the desire to lock up the
| best talent so your competitor can't have them, you have a
| recipe for indiscriminate hiring."
|
| This person has been working in a high-level capacity in
| the corporate world for over 15 years now. He has seen some
| truly reprehensible shit, and shared quite a bit of it with
| me when we meet up once a year for ice fishing. I can tell
| you right now, not only is not "nonsense", it's perfectly
| logical - just not to you, and not to a lot of other HN
| users, because entirely too many people think in the logic
| of 1s and 0s, and not in the logic of people. High-level
| business decision makers - the kind who make these
| decisions - don't think like you. They don't value what you
| value. They see engineers and programmers as expendable and
| easily replaceable - and many of them are. For every 10x or
| 100x engineer / programmer, there's 500,000 no-namers who
| can be slotted in and out without much trouble.
| ryloric wrote:
| You know, the older I get, the more the world seems
| upside down to me and I'm not even that fucking old.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| The world has always been upside down, you were just not
| looking to see it.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> They see engineers and programmers as expendable and
| easily replaceable_
|
| Most businesses see their employees as disposable
| commodities but at least Spotify, FANG and big-tech treat
| and pamper them way better than the rest.
| MisterKent wrote:
| Just because you get massaged and fed beer, doesn't mean
| they don't think of you as cattle.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| I was talking about pay not perks. How much do FAANG/big-
| tech workers earn vs everyone else in the industry.
|
| And maybe let's not victimize big-tech workers so much.
| Yeah, you have 17% chance of being laid off, but while
| you worked there you managed to save way more than people
| who work elsewhere.
|
| And everyone gets treated as cattle. But big tech workers
| get treated like those premium beef freerange cattle that
| get massages and fetch 200 dollars per kilo VS everyone
| else that gets treated like a slaughterhouse cattle.
| ergocoder wrote:
| with 400K USD a year. A fully-fed generational wealth
| style cattle.
| oblio wrote:
| Well, this is another version of the classic "I could build
| this in an weekend" trope.
|
| 9500 is probably excessive, but think of it just this way:
|
| 1. Spotify has a worldwide presence, apparently 184 markets;
| that probably entails a legal presence in many of those
| jurisdictions, sales, marketing, support, localization, etc.;
| at a conservative 2 persons per market, just that's going to
| generate about 400 jobs; now, most of those markets will be
| grouped up but the big ones will probably have tens if not
| hundreds of people dedicated to that market (the US is likely
| to have hundreds of people supporting it, for example).
|
| 2. Spotify has to build, update, maintain, extend, etc a global
| infrastructure. Just the ops team for that has to cover 3x 8h
| shifts to make it 24/7. Each region should have at least 3
| people in it, for high support availability. That's 9 people
| right there, and it would be crazy to support ~550 million
| active users with 9 people, they probably have 10 times that
| many people and teams supporting various components. So just an
| ops team of 100 is perfectly reasonable.
|
| 3. Then they need a dev team. They have... ads, various
| integrations, songs, audiobooks, podcasts, their apps or
| whatever are available on smart TVs, web, cars, bla bla bla, if
| it's 10 people for each client, that would probably mean at
| least 50 people. And 10 people per client is probably silly
| low, make that at least 100-200.
|
| 4. Then they have a bunch of backend services, probably a lot
| of them. Plop another 5-10 people for each service. That's
| going to be many more hundreds of people.
|
| 5. Then they have actual R&D, where they're exploring stuff.
| This depends on the company, but for a company that's still
| clarifying its business model, having 100 people researching
| stuff sounds reasonable.
|
| That's ~1500 people just from me eyeballing their business.
| 9500 is maybe on the high side, but considering their scale, if
| we dig deep enough into their business model, probably 5000 is
| perfectly fine.
|
| These services are crazy complex and "streaming mp3s" is a very
| reductive view.
| k2xl wrote:
| I like the way you broke thid down.
| schnable wrote:
| Plus it's a two sided market - most of that needs to be
| created and operated for consumer and producer side, and all
| the systems linking them between.
| chillingeffect wrote:
| A friend there says the labels - the producer side - are
| very demanding to work with. That could be draining
| resources.
| ghaff wrote:
| And to factor in some of the other commentary--they could
| build this in a weekend (and continue to operate it for
| relative pennies) on-prem.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Spotify does awesome music recommendation - there are no
| human curation involved like with Apple Music afaik - you
| probably need a whole bunch of people for this.
|
| They do much more than merely streaming mp3's and they
| working on a video product as well - there is some content
| creation as well i.e agents , sales , marketing and
| producers.
|
| You can probably can compare them to Netflix (12,800).
| mynegation wrote:
| That, and people often forget that - even if we stay on the
| engineering side of things - Spotify has tools and apps for
| artists, creators, and advertisers that most users never see.
| mrweasel wrote:
| While I think you're low on the legal/sales/marketing and so
| on, your estimates does trigger the question: How much
| easier/cheaper and profitable would it be to run Spotify as a
| purely stream music platform.
|
| Lose the ads, audiobooks, podcasts, drop any platform that
| isn't iOS, Android or web. Would that be profitable, or would
| people not want to buy the service?
| byyll wrote:
| I certainly couldn't build that in a weekend but nor would I
| need 9500 people. Keep in mind WhatsApp was running with 50
| engineers in 2015 when it had 900 million users. Last year,
| according to some sources, it had 3000 employees and 2.4
| billion users. And that's groups, voice messages, video and
| voice calls, WhatsApp for business, integrations and a lot
| more.
|
| Some of these seem reasonable, some not. There is no need for
| legal presence everywhere or to even have a permanent hire
| for that. The many clients make sense (including consoles
| too) but more than 10 people per client? It's not the most
| complicated app. R&D I guess makes sense too.
|
| Actually, it would be interesting to see the breakdown of
| employees by category.
|
| Regardless, I think the answer lies somewhere between what
| you said (unknown at a glance costs) and what others have
| said - too many managers managing managers and overhiring.
| passion__desire wrote:
| Whatsapp is just sending messages. Here's music
| recommendation lecture on using latest techniques to better
| serve users. I am glad that their music recommendations are
| very good. There are so many nooks and corners in a big
| company like Spotify where you need someone to be
| responsible for.
|
| Music Recommendations at Spotify - Oskar Stal, Spotify
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VvM98flwq0
| j-krieger wrote:
| I'm wondering what it is that they're _doing_ all day. The
| spotify app randomly changes, and if so, rarely for the better.
| I 'd wager spotify could benefit from X' style layoffs.
| dieortin wrote:
| With "X' style" meaning "handled in the worst possible way"?
| kranke155 wrote:
| The X layoffs are too soon to make a judgement call on, look
| at the advertiser fight X is involved in now. Its up in the
| air if they kept enough people to make advertisers happy or
| moderation. Moderation has become a real problem on X, Ive
| sent reports that were clearly a problematic account,
| sometimes even fake accounts that are stealing identities,
| and the X UI sends me a message saying "nah all good"
| eps wrote:
| The advertiser fight is primarily caused by Musk's inane
| comments, not layoffs or the lack of moderation. They do
| contribute, but to a way lesser degree.
| kranke155 wrote:
| So he didnt layoff part of the advertising team? It seems
| to me to be directly related to moderation, since its the
| usual "we dont want our ad to be near X" X being
| something advertisers steer clear of.
| CalRobert wrote:
| It hardly whips the llama's ass.
| zerr wrote:
| Overhiring is the most important factor for manager promotions,
| unfortunately.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| More and more it seems they're an advertising company that also
| serves music and podcasts. I keep seeing sponsored
| recommendations and I'm a premium subscriber, for now.
| kibwen wrote:
| Seemingly every company in the "tech" industry is just an
| advertising company shambling around in the rotten skin-suit
| of a legitimate business.
| camillomiller wrote:
| Not Apple, IBM, Microsoft and many other that don't make
| money as data merchants
| toymin wrote:
| > Not Apple
|
| They're definitely moving in that direction
| https://searchads.apple.com/
|
| > Microsoft
|
| It's not a huge part of their revenue but they definitely
| make a sizeable amount of money from ads
| mrweasel wrote:
| Microsoft is also actively trying to grow their ad
| revenue.
| robin_reala wrote:
| MS made $12B in 2023 from advertising:
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/725388/microsoft-
| corpora...
| mtmail wrote:
| That' only 6% of revenue
| (https://www.kamilfranek.com/microsoft-revenue-
| breakdown/)
| kibwen wrote:
| Apple made $5B in ad revenue in 2022, which was double
| their ad revenue from the year before. Apple is already
| being devoured from within by ads. If you think Apple
| will never stoop to putting ads in the OS like Microsoft
| does, ask yourself: where are Apple users going to go to
| escape ads? Linux? No, they'll just deal with it and keep
| buying Macs and iPhones. Apple is not your friend, they
| are a company designed to make money at all costs, and
| they're not going to leave ad revenue on the table.
| kenhwang wrote:
| Agreed, they're spending a lot of effort to be better at
| pushing "recommendations": the DJ, "smart" shuffle, the new
| home screen UI that prioritizes recommended new releases,
| concerts, and merchandise.
|
| Those are all ad slots. They want artists to pay to be
| included in those in the future.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| The magic word is "growth".
|
| For context, I find this artist's explanation of the situation
| helpful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDfNRWsMRsU
| lupire wrote:
| That's why Spotify fails artists, and wishful thinking for a
| replacement.
|
| In the OS world, it would be "why Microsoft will ultimately
| fail".
| nemo44x wrote:
| Because managers that manage managers need more people to
| justify hiring more managers.
| tootie wrote:
| I doubt even half their staff is product development. Acquiring
| and licensing content is very complicated. Marketing,
| advertising and operations. Their entire podcast stack includes
| not only end-user experience, they own multiple podcast
| production and analytics tools (via acquisition of Megaphone,
| Anchor, Chartable) not to mention their in-house production via
| stuff like Gimlet.
| redwood wrote:
| They are doing a lot, including open source. Out of curiosity is
| anyone using Backstage at their place of work for developer
| portal? Is it providing value? Should Spotify double down on
| that?
| realraghavgupta wrote:
| Yes, it is being used at my place of work. Extensive work is
| being done internally to make it the portal to everything a
| developer needs. Its definitely a great product and more work
| should be done. Spinning it off into its own entity would not
| be a bad idea, if they can deliver a lot and introduce a good
| SaaS pricing around it, with prices that should be comparable
| to what self hosting it in a kubernetes cluster would normally
| be, and not something what most companies are doing.
| empiricus wrote:
| Meanwhile I cannot see anywhere what is the streaming quality for
| Spotify on my Samsung TV. Please put a text label somewhere in
| the currently empty settings page. It should take 1h of
| programmer time. Granted, if what I suspect is true, i.e. the
| streaming data rate is too small (not configurable), then I might
| switch to a different streaming app :)
| dijit wrote:
| Reminds me of: "Nobody ever got fired for buying cloud".
|
| Spotify was a stand-out, almost no large tech company bought into
| cloud like they did, and everyone said the same thing: "It's not
| our core competence, it would require more people".
|
| I get it, it's not _sexy at all_ to deal in infrastructure, but I
| 've seen their cloud bill and it's significantly higher than
| 1,600 peoples jobs, even with the discounts they got through
| committed use and even when considering the actual costs for
| infrastructure they need.
|
| I'm sure there are inefficiencies everywhere, but this was the
| one that I talked about before and was talked down in a rather
| condescending tone. "Nobody got fired for buying cloud" is
| evidently a misnomer, because if you spend a lot of money and you
| don't have a lot of income: something has to give. And cloud has
| a lot more lock-in than most employees.
| kranke155 wrote:
| How big is the difference in your estimate, between the bills
| they have now vs cost of cloud + staff to support it?
| dijit wrote:
| Largely depends.
|
| For ML workloads anything between 6-8x cost increase for
| using cloud.
|
| For CDN costs somewhere like 3x (they're pretty smart on
| discounts here, without those it could be 100's of x)
|
| For compute somewhere like 3-4x (would be 6x before the
| discounts)
|
| Managed DB is a hard one because the cost is really high but
| I'm not 100% sure how much time is saved with the solution
| they chose because while I saw the bill I don't work there.
|
| It gets dicey with humans because it's apples to oranges,
| expensive SRE's who understand the inner-workings of cloud vs
| cheap(er) hardware folks who set things up from first
| principles with a higher up-front cost. -- FinOps with more
| traditional solutions is easier but you _still_ need people
| for that.
|
| Spotify's backend load is not entirely elastic. There are
| some elastic bits but a large chunk is pretty static.
| blcknight wrote:
| Finding people who can run infra at Spotify scale isn't easy.
| Even if they could find those people, it tough to leave aws (by
| design).
|
| They could've been more careful about avoiding lock-in by
| building more on something like kube but most startups don't
| have that foresight, and the expense of moving to on-prem is
| compounded even more when they have so much wrapped up in the
| aws ecosystem.
| dijit wrote:
| They've already managed a switch from AWS to Google Cloud
| once in their past.
| mrweasel wrote:
| > Finding people who can run infra at Spotify scale isn't
| easy.
|
| You won't get any argument from me on that one, but it's
| worth remembering that it's also hard to find people who are
| able to run systems in the cloud cost effectively.
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| TikTok found all of those people very quickly, they famously
| don't use a public cloud provider. Infra isn't magic.
| hiddencost wrote:
| TikTok has 100k employees and shoes shits money.
| dijit wrote:
| Not sure what "shoes shits money" means, but contextually
| they had $9.9B in revenue for the year 2022 and an
| operational expenditure of $9.4B.
|
| I believe this means they generated $500m for bytedance,
| but I can't find a good citation, bytedance itself
| generated $6B in profits though for the fiscal year 2022
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1342785/bytedance-
| key-qu...
| cbozeman wrote:
| > Infra isn't magic.
|
| No, but you're definitely dealing with the Arthur C. Clarke
| quote: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is
| indistinguishable from magic".
| ctvo wrote:
| Where in the article did you see cloud costs being the reason
| for this layoff?
|
| > Spotify is cutting almost 1,600 jobs as the music streaming
| service blamed a slowing economy and higher borrowing costs in
| the latest round of redundancies at big tech companies.
|
| It clearly states later that in a zero interest environment
| Spotify borrowed heavily and over hired, in this environment
| it's no longer sustainable and they had to let employees go.
|
| Did you just assume "costs" meant infrastructure costs like
| cloud?
| dijit wrote:
| Cost's don't exist in a vacuum.
|
| it's easier to lay people off than to save millions in cloud
| spending when you've already committed to $x-billion over 5
| years.
| ctvo wrote:
| A single engineer is 400k in total costs, and they hired
| thousands for initiatives that didn't pan out. Thinking
| cloud costs come anywhere close to being a factor here is
| nonsense and not supported by anything in the article.
|
| You extrapolated that costs meant cloud costs vs. them
| overhiring during the pandemic and investing in things like
| podcasts, which haven't had the expected returns. You did
| this in an attempt to tie this back to some injustice that
| happened to you in a comment section far far away, which
| you've edited the post to remove now, thankfully.
| dijit wrote:
| Five things wrong
|
| 1. I didn't edit my comment to remove anything like that,
| so I'm not sure what you're suggesting.
|
| 2. I didn't perceive injustice, I thought it was a bit
| brainless to not associate company costs with long term
| survivability.
|
| 3. An engineer being 400k TC is an anomaly, Spotify does
| not pay any of it's Swedish engineering force nearly that
| much, and since we don't know the demographics of the
| layoffs it's hard to argue engineers anyway. (Citation
| here says the avg was 125.000[0] which is still very high
| if these were europeans)
|
| 4. Their cloud bill would _still_ be roughly 500 people
| based on that TC based on committed use _alone_.
|
| 5. Costs = Costs. Overspending in many areas = no more
| money. I'm merely suggesting that they overspent in one
| area that is now affecting another area indirectly. Yes,
| I drew a line.
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38516794
| ctvo wrote:
| > 3. An engineer being 400k TC is an anomaly, Spotify
| does not pay any of it's Swedish engineering force nearly
| that much, and since we don't know the demographics of
| the layoffs it's hard to argue engineers anyway.
| (Citation here says the avg was 125.000[0] which is still
| very high if these were europeans)
|
| Are we going to ignore that on average their US engineers
| costs significantly more than ~400K total costs and they
| have an engineering hub in New York City?
|
| > 4. Their cloud bill would still be roughly 500 people
| based on that TC based on committed use alone.
|
| And they paid Meghan and Harry 20,000,000 USD for a
| podcast deal that didn't work out. That's 50 engineers.
| Should we look at the Rogan deal too and go through
| everything that didn't work out in the last 3 years?
|
| You've provided no evidence that by _not_ using the cloud
| Spotify would have made more money or prevented these
| layoffs. And costs is one thing: Could they have grown as
| quickly? Scaled as fast? Hired as easily? Without
| numbers, which you won 't share (outside of "trust me
| I've seen it"), this becomes even harder to debate.
| dijit wrote:
| > Are we going to ignore that on average their US
| engineers costs significantly more than ~400K total costs
| and they have an engineering hub in New York City?
|
| Yes, because you're asserting that:
|
| A) That engineers who have been laid off _have_ that TC.
|
| B) That it's engineers we're talking about.
|
| C) That it's mostly localised in NYC; a high CoL city by
| all metrics.
|
| Their other spending is also shameful, it doesn't
| discredit other poor spending.
|
| You're a little bit upset with me for some reason, I
| would surmise that you're feeling somewhat defensive,
| maybe you work for a cloud or you've skilled entirely
| into only being able to work with cloud. That's fine, but
| you need to understand _financial constraints_ in
| business.
|
| This is the side of business I am most knowledgeable
| about so I am qualified to have an opinion; situations
| like Harry and Meghan? Rogan? Not my area at all and it
| would be impossibly arrogant of me to assume I know
| anything at all about those situations.
|
| Also: "trust me bro" is not my position, the way I saw
| the numbers is a grey area legally and I'm not sure any
| Spotify people want to chime in to clear it up because
| it's likely one thing that is under tight NDA.
|
| Here's some _very old_ info though that 'll help you
| realise that the order of magnitude is there:
| https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/20/spotify-will-spend-
| nearly-45...
| Y-bar wrote:
| > Citation here says the avg was 125.000[0]
|
| My comment you are referring to.
|
| For the record, I used Glass Door, checked mostly
| Stockholm, but Paris, Barcelona, and Helsinki all seems
| to be in a similar range.
|
| which lists most roles (including managers and senior
| engineers) as making less than SEK 1M ($98k) per year,
| most in the $75-$87k range it seems. Add on office space
| and equipment and other costs of roughly $30k per year
| and you got something like the above number.
| dijit wrote:
| understandable, FWIW since I have numbers on these things
| from working in multiple companies it might be nice to
| map out where those extras actually go for other readers:
|
| $500/mo for seat licensing (for developers) this
| includes: Git hosting/Copilot/Office
| Suit/IDE's/Figma/Slack etc;
|
| $500-$1500/mo for office space (depends a lot, in my
| company a seat costs me $500/mo and I'm in the middle of
| the city- larger companies may pay even less but lets
| assume a very high cost since it's a tech company).
|
| $50/m for preventative healthcare (friskvard in sweden;
| this is actually higher than the maximum tax-free value)
|
| $100/m for non-preventative health insurance (IE; private
| healthcare)
|
| $120~/m amortised cost of laptops (assuming $4000 macbook
| over 3 years and a screen amortised over 5)
|
| 5% monthly salary for pension, so, that varies a lot.
|
| But it roughly aligns with your $30k p.a
| occz wrote:
| Payroll tax is missing from this listing - for Sweden
| this is 31.42% in the normal case.
| ponector wrote:
| Don't forget they have offices in India and South
| America. Exchange rate is 1 US dev to 2-5 Indian dev
| (depends on seniority level).
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| The cost of an employee is significantly more than their
| TC. It's a function of many resources, including
| compensation, hardware, space (real estate), corporate
| services, software licenses, taxes, etc.
| cedws wrote:
| This is why I'm bullish about Oxide (who are building hardware
| to make it easy to essentially run your own cloud.) Nobody
| wants to deal with the nasty parts of running servers but if a
| company can take some of that complexity away, you could save a
| tonne of money over AWS.
| notRobot wrote:
| How is running your own cloud different than traditional bare
| metal?
| cedws wrote:
| For one, you can use your compute resources much more
| elasticly. You can create and delete VMs on demand and
| don't need to drive to the colo to reimage.
| dboreham wrote:
| More automation.
| throwboatyface wrote:
| Traditional bare metal involved complicated packaging and
| release processes. You would literally have a diagram of
| "these are the physical servers running this service (LB,
| web server, etc.)" and be able to point to them. You could
| overprovision workloads to tolerate failure but not just
| shuffle a service from one machine to another.
|
| When I used to work in a similar environment we would
| develop code, then we would give it to a QA team. They
| would test it and give it to an Ops team. The Ops team
| would schedule a maintenance window and roll out the new
| code on each server. This happened maybe once a quarter
| because testing and releasing was a week-long process.
|
| Racking new servers and provisioning them also required
| some manual labour. We had a process to use PXE to
| provision the machines but it was still toil.
| Virtualization was a big benefit because you could at least
| create and blow away VMs without having to re-image a whole
| server from scratch.
|
| "Running your own cloud" implies that developers can treat
| instances like cattle and interact via an API. But it also
| means there's a standard set of tooling for fleet
| management. None of this stuff is entirely new but in small
| or mid-sized orgs it was out of reach 10 years ago.
| dagw wrote:
| traditional bare metal: Email IT and ask for 3 severs spun
| up for this small in-house project my team is working on.
| Email back and forth for a few days, book two meetings, and
| then wait 10-14 days before getting access to the servers.
|
| Cloud: log onto a web portal, select the specs I want for
| the servers, press OK and log in 30 seconds later.
| rcbdev wrote:
| Then wait a week for tech support in India to respond
| because the public load balancer was provisioned with a
| malformed cert and there is no way to sensibly
| reconfigure it.
|
| Oh wait, that's just the IBM Cloud...
| throwaw12 wrote:
| > Spotify was a stand-out, almost no large tech company bought
| into cloud like they did
|
| Isn't this what made Spotify success? Yes, they could have
| build their own datacenters, but someone else could outcompete
| them in the meantime.
|
| They have traded off something for another thing.
| philistine wrote:
| I don't think one of you has to be wrong for another one to
| be right. Should Spotify have focused on its _core
| competency_ early in its life? Sure. But at some point in the
| long years since, Spotify should have 100% looked at their
| cloud bills and built a way out of that lock-in.
| throwaw12 wrote:
| > Spotify should have 100% looked at their cloud bills and
| built a way out of that lock-in.
|
| Absolutely, but everything has ROI, ROI of fixing cloud
| bills were probably smaller than "possible growth"
|
| Now they know which features failed, they can start
| deprecating or stop growing them and refocus on cloud bills
| dijit wrote:
| I think that's a good take, it's easy to look in hindsight
| and say that they made wrong choices but we wouldn't even be
| having the conversation had they not been at least somewhat
| successful.
|
| The question becomes then: 9,500 employee's and none among
| them know how (or wanted) to regain enough costs to save 17%
| of the company from losing their job just before Christmas?
|
| Certain features (spotify wrapped for example) would
| definitely be a lot harder with more traditional hosting. But
| the bulk of Spotify's workload are not significantly hampered
| by moving slower on infrastructure and recuperating
| significant costs.
|
| It's just very easy to keep piling infra costs on top of
| infra costs and not thinking about it, especially if it feels
| disconnected from company financials for most developers and
| they do not see a line between spending and jobs.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Spotify was, in theory, a growing product oriented company
| which means everyone is focused on growing revenue. To
| focus on cost savings means enough to make up for the GCP
| bills means you focus less on revenue and that means less
| growth. Saving money and losing 20% of your stock valuation
| due to slower growth is not a good trade off for those
| running such companies. That's not to say you can't have
| slow long term cost oriented initiatives but drastic
| efforts at the last minute (what you'd need to save those
| 17% of jobs this year) aren't that.
| marcinzm wrote:
| It's actually non-trivial to run an efficient cost center
| department that actually supports other departments properly.
| The incentive structures are just horribly difficult to align.
| Cloud's selling point is that you won't have to spend 6 months
| filling out forms to get a single out of date VM (yes, that
| happened to me).
| nopassrecover wrote:
| Until you get the worst of both worlds and have to align an
| enterprise architecture approval committee, get cyber sign-
| off, put the request through your service desk, have it land
| with some sort of enterprise task prioritisation team, and
| finally land with your internal cloud team to action the
| request your team isn't empowered to do, only to then have a
| simple service provisioning turn into a massively
| overcomplicated set of extra cloud bits and pieces getting
| provisioned and retemplated and secured and configured over
| the course of months, as that overallocated team find 20
| minutes here or there only to hit some new wall as the cloud
| settings look different to the last time they did it or some
| unforeseen setting requirement was overlooked in the original
| request, leading to a two week lag on email responses and
| ticket handover before it gets picked up again.
| marcinzm wrote:
| That is why companies such as Spotify don't focus on cost
| savings as much as people here seem to think they should. A
| focus on cost savings inevitably means bureaucracy which
| means time spent on that instead of on product features.
| That means not just less growth for the stock markets but
| also more attrition due to good engineers hating the
| process. Of course at some point it's unsustainable but
| right until that moment it makes perfect sense.
|
| edit: And that moment depends not just on costs but the
| growth rate of the company so it's almost impossible to
| predict ahead of time (otherwise wall street investing
| would be a lot more boring).
| spamizbad wrote:
| You can end up in the same space even with a Kubernetes
| Cluster in the cloud when its fully subscribed and IT has no
| budget for more EC2 nodes.
| spaceywilly wrote:
| I would caution against drawing grand conclusions from these
| recent layoff rounds. Companies overhired during the pandemic,
| and now they are trimming that fat. It's not necessarily a sign
| of any big strategic mistakes beyond "we hired too many people"
| jklinger410 wrote:
| > Companies overhired during the pandemic, and now they are
| trimming that fat
|
| Citation needed
| rcbdev wrote:
| Anyone who had a LinkedIn profile in tech with open DMs
| during that time will probably confirm this.
| spaceywilly wrote:
| The original article
|
| >ValueAct's chief executive, Mason Morfit, said Spotify's
| costs had "exploded" and that it was "built for the bubble"
| jklinger410 wrote:
| COVID != "the bubble"
| dlkf wrote:
| I think this is actually pretty well-established, eg
| https://news.crunchbase.com/layoffs/analysis-big-tech-
| pandem...
| soderfoo wrote:
| Generally I agree with what your saying, but
|
| > I've seen their cloud bill and it's significantly higher than
| 1,600 peoples jobs
|
| An apples-to-apples comparison requires looking at all
| associated costs of switching to on prem (salaries, hardware,
| etc...).
|
| I've only been a part of this analysis at a company dealing
| with a cloud bill in the low tens of millions, nowhere near the
| scale of Spotify (and I'm still relatively new to all of this).
|
| > And cloud has a lot more lock-in than most employees.
|
| It's a shame there are not better abstractions to facilitate
| moving to and fro.
| falserum wrote:
| Cloud providers would benefit from actively fighting such
| abstractions.
| tootie wrote:
| Is their cloud bill more or less than they pay Joe Rogan?
| dijit wrote:
| more, actually.
| bogomipz wrote:
| >"Spotify was a stand-out, almost no large tech company bought
| into cloud like they did, and everyone said the same thing:
| "It's not our core competence, it would require more people".
|
| I'm not sure what you mean by this as Spotify was actually
| quite late buying into cloud. They ran on bare metal through at
| least 2015. From their engineering blog:
|
| ">Thus, in early 2015 we started exploring what a cloud
| strategy would look like for Spotify."[1]
|
| So they would have been running on bare metal through some of
| the biggest spikes in growth i.e launching in the US market. I
| don't think they bought in any more or any less than anyone
| else who transitioned from bare metal to cloud and for probably
| the same reasons.
|
| [1] https://engineering.atspotify.com/2019/12/views-from-the-
| clo...
| throwaway2990 wrote:
| lol why does Spotify even have so many employees to begin with.
| Doubt it was 1600 tech jobs cos they don't need anywhere close to
| that to run the service.
| pachico wrote:
| Firing people is business as usual. I don't know why this is
| usually taken with such surprise.
|
| It's part of the life cycle of many companies to hyper-hire when
| money flows in, and cut lots of jobs when they "re-adjust". I
| don't think this is good, I personally don't like it, but I
| learned not to be surprised anymore.
|
| We like cloud because it scales in and out: often management
| don't see workforce differently.
| crote wrote:
| Mass firings like these are _not_ normal.
|
| In countries with functional labor laws, it's straight-up
| illegal unless you're basically going through bankruptcy. Mass
| firings should only happen if either 1) there's a very
| significant economic crisis going on, or 2) the company is
| doing so poorly its immediate future is uncertain.
|
| The Silicon Valley style mass-hiring followed by mass-firing
| style of management is indicative of poor management. In a
| well-run company this should never happen, as the same could be
| achieved by simply reducing the hiring rate and letting natural
| attrition take care of the rest.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Or, if you want to win big, you have to make big bets. This
| applies to both employers doing mass hiring and employees
| choosing to work at employers aiming for explosive growth.
|
| It is not poor management, it is simply a different tactic.
| Sometimes things work out, sometimes they don't. The fact
| that Silicon Valley has succeeded in producing the most
| profitable companies in the last few decades seems to be
| relevant.
| ghaff wrote:
| You wouldn't think that most people here would be
| campaigning for companies to hire much more slowly,
| conservatively, and probably at salaries more in line with
| the market as a whole.
| magicalist wrote:
| Let's not romanticize correlation. Silicon valley also
| spent years asking how many ping pong balls fit in a bus,
| only hired Stanford grads, and sheltered sexual harassers
| in executive roles. Turns out those were neither necessary
| or sufficient for success either. Revenue and low interest
| rates can hide a lot of dumb decisions.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Correlating risk and reward is how a market works. Taking
| risks would not make any sense otherwise.
| crote wrote:
| Spotify has been around for 15 years, and its IPO was 7
| years ago. They are _well_ beyond their "explosive growth"
| phase, and anyone working for them could not be faulted for
| expecting to join a mature and stable company.
|
| I can definitely agree with the "bet big" argument for
| startups - but Spotify _isn 't a startup_ and hasn't been
| one for years. It's a billion-dollar multinational!
| gedy wrote:
| > 1) there's a very significant economic crisis going on
|
| There is of sorts, with high interest rates and inflation.
| This is shaking the foundations of how a lot of companies
| have operated since 2008.
| asadotzler wrote:
| Interest rates are not historically high and neither is
| inflation.
| ianwalter wrote:
| Instead of investing in massive podcaster deals, they should have
| just focused on integrating podcasts into the app in a sane way.
| I would pay more if it were as good as Pocket Casts, but it's
| nowhere close.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| The whole point was to move into podcasts for exclusivity so
| they had something they could put behind a hard paywall to
| boost revenue - the music service will never be significantly
| profitable and will probably never be genuinely profitable at
| all, so they need to move into another area or they will
| eventually collapse.
| ianwalter wrote:
| Yea I understand that, but whats the point of that strategy
| if users don't want to even subscribe to podcasts in the app
| because how bad the UI is. It's like they've never used a
| podcast app before.
| sva_ wrote:
| I think you can listen to them for free but with ads.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| No.
| sva_ wrote:
| How so? https://www.spotify.com/us/free/
| pawelduda wrote:
| Maybe now they will be able to focus on what matters instead of
| enshittening UI every few months
| Y-bar wrote:
| At an average yearly cost of $125000 per employee they could
| either cut 1600 employees or not fund some random podcaster.
| mouzogu wrote:
| "..Spotify had taken advantage of cheap borrowing during 2020 and
| 2021, when central bankers cut interest rates sharply in response
| to coronavirus pandemic lockdowns"
|
| > "Embracing this leaner structure will also allow us to invest
| our profits more strategically back into the business,"
|
| > invest our profits more strategically back into the business
|
| why didn't they do this in 2020 when they got zero interest loans
| and free money from the government?
|
| profits are for "strategic" investment but loans are for un-
| strategic and unsustainable hiring? got it.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| I don't understand the question? They were able to use money
| more freely as it was more abundant, so they were able to take
| more risks. Now that money is more expensive, they need to be
| more careful about it.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I think parent might be overemphasizing _strategic_ in that
| quote.
|
| >> _This is not a step back; it's a strategic reorientation.
| We're still committed to investing and making bold bets, but
| now, with a more focused approach, ensuring Spotify's
| continued profitability and ability to innovate._
|
| "Strategic" could be replaced with "efficient". They were
| previously optimized for growth -- now, they're optimizing
| for growth:krona.
|
| Also, it is refreshing to see a head cut announcement that
| doesn't bury the lede: we're firing people, and this sucks.
| rchaud wrote:
| When a company is publicly traded, mass firing
| announcements are no longer buried, it's red meat for
| shareholders.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Was lessso taking issue with burying, and moreso with the
| recent spate of bullshit "This is good for everyone" or
| "The world suddenly changed" or "This was always the
| plan" posturing in announcements.
|
| "We optimized for one thing. Things changed. No we're
| optimizing for a different thing."
|
| Doesn't need to be more obfuscated than that.
| mikrl wrote:
| More so now that it's their own money and not yours they're
| being more careful with it.
| rchaud wrote:
| They invested the pandemic ZIRP bonanza on the 'transformative'
| IP that is podcasts.
|
| In lieu of actual profitability, they also chucked in $1bn to
| buy up their own stock to maximize the CEO's already enormous
| compensation.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/20/spotify-to-spend-1b-buying...
| bogomipz wrote:
| Wow, it's pretty wild that an unprofitable company spent a
| billion dollars on share buybacks.
| htrp wrote:
| >Severance pay: We will start with a baseline for all employees,
| with the average employee receiving approximately five months of
| severance. This will be calculated based on local notice period
| requirements and employee tenure.
|
| Is this a super vague way of saying we're letting go of the
| senior people with tenure first. The average severance being five
| months implies that most people being let go probably aren't the
| people hired during 2020 and 21.
|
| On a separate note, we can add bandmates to the insane titles
| that a company uses for their employees.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > Is this a super vague way of saying we're letting go of the
| senior people with tenure first. The average severance being
| five months implies that most people being let go probably
| aren't the people hired during 2020 and 21.
|
| No, they're saying that severance is based on tenure (and local
| notice period requirements). On average, people laid off get 5
| months worth of severance - some more, some less, based on
| tenure.
| Scarblac wrote:
| Labour laws will apply, they probably can't just pick who they
| lay off. Maybe they have to let go the same proportion of
| people at all levels of seniority.
| eythian wrote:
| Yeah, where I live (NL), it's required to be something like
| "group people into roles, then let people go in reverse order
| of seniority (i.e. LIFO) within those roles."
| zucked wrote:
| This is refreshingly pragmatic. I guess I shouldn't expect
| anything less from that part of the world.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Isn't last in first out ageist?
| eric-hu wrote:
| LIFO sounds like it's based on hitting order, not
| worker's age.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Surely, a law would not be needed to tell a business to
| terminate based on hitting order.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| It's slightly more complicated in NL than just last in
| first out, for larger amounts like Spotify is doing here.
| Apart from grouping by role, there is also a requirement
| to ensure the distribution of workers across age groups
| remains as similar as possible after the reduction
| compared to before.
|
| Age groups in this case are 10-year buckets, 15-25, 25-35
| etc. So if a role has for example 40% of the workers in
| 25-35, 20% in 35-45, 20% in 45-55 and 20% in 55+ then
| after the reduction it still has to be as close as
| possible to that distribution. So it's not like all of
| the younger workers that are "last in" in their early 20s
| would be fired, it would be similar numbers across each
| age group, within each group it's the last hired.
| amoss wrote:
| It's the same approach in Sweden.
| chrisandchris wrote:
| Some countries have longer notice periods. If you would work
| for Spotify in Switzerland, after 2 years you have 2 months
| notice. Given the period must starts with a new month (by law),
| your notice would start on 1st January. Adter 10 years its 3
| months, where 5 months severance pay (as i understand it) would
| "only" cover at least 2 additional months.
| BossingAround wrote:
| I don't understand how you got from the quote to "senior people
| are let go first".
| dcminter wrote:
| I think they may have misunderstood the meaning of the word
| tenure (note "with tenure") and not realised it meant only
| duration of employment here (versus its use in US academia).
| greycol wrote:
| There's also some weight in the word senior as that can
| also be referring to someone who's moved up within paybands
| within the same jobtitle as well as the (now less certain)
| expectation that someone who continues to work at the same
| place will get promotions to more senior positions as they
| show they're capable of them.
| pyrophane wrote:
| I was surprised that the "average" is 5. It makes me wonder
| what that distribution looks like.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| as always, this means US people are cut immediately while
| acting like a progressive employer but not sharing any of the
| values of their European homeland when they dont have to
| joegahona wrote:
| "Bandmates" is bad, and dishonest. It's like Pfizer calling
| every employee "doctors." Stolen valor.
| linsomniac wrote:
| I guess that defect that's been open for 3 years to "actually
| shuffle large playlists" doesn't stand a chance.
| Hakeemmidan wrote:
| Why do these mass layoffs keep happening in the software
| industry? Or is this a global phenomenon that exists across all
| industries?
| ulfw wrote:
| Only to a small extend. Mostly it happens in software. And no
| it's not just "overhiring" (that doesn't happen across so many
| industries). That's only part of it. We all know with AI we
| won't need white collar jobs anymore. If I had children I
| wouldn't allow them to study CS. Not anymore.
| thepablohansen wrote:
| What would you have them study instead? If you're optimizing
| for what AI is least likely to be able to accomplish, some
| forms of blue collar labor would probably rank highest on the
| list.
| vlowrian wrote:
| I feel like you're overestimating the impact of AI on the
| current wave of dismissals. It's hard to say without any
| actual data, but there seems to be a lot of FUD regarding AI
| replacing white-collar and CS jobs.
|
| I don't have better data than you, but I'd be very much
| surprised if AI would replace computer scientists rather than
| being a tool which will change what we'll have to be good at
| as computer scientists.
|
| There is a lot of digitalisation to be done and AI might
| change the price of doing that, but it won't make a whole
| academic discipline obsolete.
| dubcanada wrote:
| Software industry is a giant bubble 90% of the time, so it's
| usually the first one to go. But no most industries seem to be
| hiring averagely to better then average at least as per the
| JOLTs report.
| whatyesaid wrote:
| A lot of these companies have people doing no real work, even
| afterwards of layoffs, they're bloated. You can't layoff
| essential people otherwise you die.
|
| You can look at companies like Spotify and Twitter, they ship
| like one feature a year if you average.
| fullshark wrote:
| It's the end of the internet service software business cycle.
| This plus a ton of unprofitable VC funded companies unable to
| get the funding they were hoping to get with interest rates up
| lead to a massive pullback.
|
| Will things change next year? Maybe if some IPOs hit and the VC
| pump and dump pipeline gets back up and running.
| adam_arthur wrote:
| Software companies are pretty uniquely positioned such that
| they have far more employees than are operationally necessary.
|
| Not to say that those employees don't provide value, but the
| spread between operationally stable employment levels and
| current headcount is far wider than other industries.
|
| Thus, more potential for large cuts.
| Solvency wrote:
| Ok but why?
| delfinom wrote:
| During COVID, software companies massively overhired,
| because the executives in charge went all "hurr durr,
| digital is the future boys! Nobody is going outside
| anymore!". Not to mention the government was handing out
| money like candy through various schemes complete with low
| interest rates. I believe Facebook (as example) alone went
| from a headcount from 40k to over 80k employees in just 2
| years of COVID.
|
| 2022+ was the "return to normal" with online trends quickly
| reverting back to pre-COVID levels. This resulted in a
| sudden drop in online economics (such as ad spend) that
| could justify the bloated workforces.
|
| Drastically increased interest rates to fight inflation
| also cut off the cheap money flow to companies that would
| previously burn it like crazy on "R&D" and the like.
| adam_arthur wrote:
| Because margin on core software products tends to be far
| higher than other industries.
|
| For example, retailers tend to have single digit margins.
| Software products often have 50%+ and sometimes 70%+.
|
| Thus lots of excess money to hire people that aren't
| necessarily operationally critical.
|
| A retailer with a large excess of store associates would
| fail quickly, whereas a software company can often survive
| in perpetuity
| abkolan wrote:
| The Spotify inserted ads during the podcast makes a lot of sense
| now. They are really trying to make the books look good. Is this
| a leading indicator that the podcasts could go more towards the
| exclusives / originals route? For example: Like Joe Rogan.
| code_runner wrote:
| Spotify is actively moving away from originals (or at least
| changing how they do it). Inseted ads gives them better
| tracking and with better reporting... $$$$
| skywhopper wrote:
| I suppose I appreciate that the CEO was mostly honest about the
| goals and what the business actually values. "Supporting work",
| ie operations, maintenance, etc is considered worthless. Near
| term financial ROI is the _only_ metric that is important.
| Investments in the long term health of the business and treating
| employees with respect are of no consequence.
|
| We all know this is true, but so few layoff announcements are
| willing to spell it out.
|
| That said, the thing that's missing is accountability of the
| executives. They overhired and overinvested in 2020-21. Where is
| the accountability for their massive failure of leadership?
| kderbyma wrote:
| I predicted this......their API v2......that was all I needed to
| see you know they were firing a lot of people......they need to
| get profit somehow and they have no knowledge at the top....so
| they do what all dumb companies do....flounder until someone
| saves them....so cut cut cut.
| someonehere wrote:
| Meanwhile Apple came late to the game and now is just sitting it
| out. Wonder what will happen in a few years?
| nojvek wrote:
| Post-pandemic, the trend of Corporations raking in higher and
| higher profits, while needing fewer and fewer staff scares me.
|
| The most obvious and likely outcome is it drastically separates
| the ultra wealthy from middle class.
|
| With rise of AI and automation, that trend will likely
| accelerate. The top 10% hold more than 50% of wealth. It's likely
| in a few decades, the top 1% will hold more than 50% of the
| wealth. They already hold 28% of wealth.
|
| https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2022/10/the-wealthiest-0-1-o...
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=UdXz
| nojvek wrote:
| Post-pandemic, the trend of Corporations raking in higher and
| higher profits, while needing fewer and fewer staff scares me.
|
| The most obvious and likely outcome is it drastically separates
| the ultra wealthy from middle class.
|
| With rise of AI and automation, that trend will likely
| accelerate. The top 10% hold more than 50% of wealth. It's likely
| in a few decades, the top 1% will hold more than 50% of the
| wealth. They already hold 28% of wealth.
|
| https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2022/10/the-wealthiest-0-1-o...
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=UdXz
| TexanFeller wrote:
| Things are probably just going back to normal. Companies went
| on hiring binges while unprecedented cash was pumped into the
| economy and interest rates were historically low. Now that all
| that is being walked back employment levels are going back to
| 2019 or a bit before.
| eastbound wrote:
| How is that different than the IMF pumping cash in 1998 into
| the Russia economy, only so that private companies take the
| profits and create oligarchs and various lords, who then
| emigrated to the French Riviera with women who became widows
| there, empoverishing the Russian land even further, as shows
| by the economist Joseph Stieglitz in his book Globalization
| and its Discontents?
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Presumably it's different because the point of the cash was
| to support people whose livelihoods were disrupted by the
| pandemic?
| cglan wrote:
| isnt this just massive overhiring due to free money during the
| pandemic? Not sure this is an example of needing fewer and
| fewer stuff. Spotify is just not profitable except barely like
| 1 quarter
| Aurornis wrote:
| The pandemic trend at many of these companies was to
| aggressively overhire. If you look at headcount for many of
| these companies it's still significantly above 2020 levels and
| even often above the old trend lines.
|
| If you hire an unprecedented number of people in short period
| of time, you're almost always going to have to cut a
| significant number of them later. Hiring is hard and even
| during good times a rapid expansion like we saw during COVID
| hiring is going to bring in people and departments that don't
| work out.
|
| > The most obvious and likely outcome is it drastically
| separates the ultra wealthy from middle class.
|
| I think this doesn't obviously follow. Like I said, hiring
| trends aren't all that distorted if you average out the recent
| layoffs with the excessive COVID hiring.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| > Corporations raking in higher and higher profits,
|
| To what is this claim responding? Spotify only turned a profit
| in 1 of the last 5 quarters. It has _never_ turned an annual
| profit.
|
| I actually think the story is quite different here. Tech
| companies had been hiring like drunken sailors leading up to
| the pandemic. They're only in the last year rationalizing down
| to levels that are necessary and productive. I have close
| friends at a few FAANGs and the stories of bureaucracy, bloat,
| and entitlement are mind blowing. Meta/Facebook made the right
| move by taking a hatchet to middle management. Let's hope the
| other big ones do the same before the plague spreads further.
| apwell23 wrote:
| > Meta/Facebook made the right move by taking a hatchet to
| middle management.
|
| They are all back( layer reduction was never really done in
| practice). It was just a dog and pony show. Meta is hiring
| aggressively again and middle management is bloated than ever
| before.
| lettergram wrote:
| The poor today are the middle class of 15-20 years ago and the
| kings of 300 years ago.
|
| It's not perfect but a rising tide does raise all ships.
|
| Regarding the ultra wealthy, the disparity was actually greater
| in the past.
|
| All that said, you distribute wealth by reducing taxes on the
| poor and increasing it on wealthy. Alternatively, shifting the
| growth differential such that the poor grow faster than the
| wealthy (hard in a capitalistic economy). That said, I don't
| see the wealth disparity as a problem itself; if you have the
| top 1% gain more wealth but it's easier to become the top 1% or
| the top 1% rotates out often it's probably better
| KineticLensman wrote:
| > a rising tide does raise all ships
|
| The thing that has always bothered me about this analogy is
| that a sea level rise affects all ships uniformly while the
| magnification of wealth doesn't. It's more like everyone
| standing on a plain and then the centre deforms upwards,
| creating a peak of wealth while most people are on the (only
| slightly higher) foothills.
| gusgus01 wrote:
| The poor of today (2023) are the middle class of 2003-2008?
| That's a hard comparison with the housing crash of 2008, but
| I don't think the tide has risen enough for that comparison
| to be accurate.
| freedomben wrote:
| Yeah I agree, I don't think that's true overall.
|
| Maybe in some very small senses, like many of the poor
| today have iPhones, which are way more capable than even
| the middle class phones of mid 00s. But yeah middle class
| in the mid 00s owned a decent house. Most of those houses
| haven't changed much since then.
| CodeMage wrote:
| > The poor today are the middle class of 15-20 years ago and
| the kings of 300 years ago.
|
| I've yet to hear this claim from someone who has been truly
| poor at least once in their life. When you have to live
| paycheck to paycheck, and stress out every single month over
| the uncertainty, not knowing if you'll be able to pay the
| bills and have enough to eat, let me know if you feel like
| "the king of 300 years ago".
| sydbarrett74 wrote:
| People are better off in absolute terms, yes. That is
| incontrovertible.
|
| What matters to the human psyche is _relative_ well-being
| compared to one 's peers. And by those measures, the 'middle
| class' is demonstrably worse off than 50 years ago.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > People are better off in absolute terms, yes. That is
| incontrovertible.
|
| That people are better off now than 15-20 years ago (see
| OP) is _absolutely not_ obvious.
|
| > What matters to the human psyche is relative well-being
| compared to one's peers.
|
| Uh, see the Neoliberal shift that happened some decades
| ago. Things got worse. The rich got richer and the rest got
| poorer.
|
| This isn't some psyche thing for crying in the sink.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| > _What matters to the human psyche is relative well-being
| compared to one 's peers_
|
| Like it or not, that's how we primates work, yes.
|
| Of course, in aggregate that distribution never changes. If
| you or your group gets lower status, someone else gets
| higher. It's a true zero sum game. And half of us will
| always be below average.
| alexanderchr wrote:
| No this is not correct. Half of us will always be below
| the mean, this much is true, but we can obviously do
| something about the spread of the distribution.
| rorroe53 wrote:
| Middle class 15-20 years ago was able to buy, or even finance
| building of their own houses. How many poor you know who do
| that?
|
| Only thing that has really improved is access to cheap Made
| in China goods, and perhaps plane tickets. But actual
| necessities like housing are becoming more and more
| unaffordable.
| apwell23 wrote:
| > But actual necessities like housing are becoming more and
| more unaffordable.
|
| That has to do with supply restrictions with NIMBY and
| environmet regulatory capture by nimbies. Blame your local
| boomer neighbor not a billionaire.
| verall wrote:
| por que no los dos?
| apwell23 wrote:
| should ask parent commenter that. haha.
| butlike wrote:
| "a rising tide raises all ships." What happens to the ships
| when the proverbial glass runneth over?
| emodendroket wrote:
| They're not "taking in higher and higher profits" so much as
| abandoning speculative investments.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Short term profits are almost completely defined by historic
| investment (and thus, historic staff).
|
| How long term profits will react to those changes is entirely
| still to be seen. There's nothing telling you profits will get
| higher and higher, or that they will diminish, or anything
| else.
| csmiller wrote:
| Spotify isn't really profitable, and their deals with the
| labels mean that they probably never will be IMO
| zehaeva wrote:
| Can't wait for the Butlerian Jihad to begin!
|
| Flippancy aside, as others have pointed out, Spotify isn't
| turning a profit. Other than the tangency of blaming AI for all
| of our ills, this seems like a non-sequitur.
| Vicinity9635 wrote:
| > _middle class._
|
| There's no such thing. Classes have clear boundaries. That's
| why we originally used the word class.
|
| Children, reitrees, and the inedependently wealthy _aren 't_
| working class because they don't (have to) work. If you _must_
| work, you 're working class. That's it. Those are the real
| classes. Most of us are just working class, plain and simple.
| Myself included.
|
| It's a propaganda term with no basis in reality other than
| people's feelings: https://www.fastcompany.com/90330573/who-is-
| actually-middle-...
| jmarchello wrote:
| Anytime I see layoffs like this, All I hear is "We hired for the
| sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal
| 'growth', But now reality has set in and we need our employees to
| serve a purpose beyond simply headcount".
|
| In my opinion they did these employees a disservice by hiring
| them in the first place. We need our companies to act more
| responsibly regardless of the price of capital. Innovate sure,
| but don't fill up your tank when gas is cheap just to do
| doughnuts in the parking lot.
| maxehmookau wrote:
| I wholeheartedly agree. It's about time governments started
| signalling to employers that this sort of behaviour will not go
| unpunished. After all, it's the state that will have to pick up
| the tab for the rampant over-hiring in the form of social
| security and healthcare.
| freedomben wrote:
| What should the punishment be? Fines for layoffs?
| toss1 wrote:
| Sure. There are all kinds of things that could be done to
| increase their consideration of moves like this and
| simultaneously benefit the people affected.
|
| E.g., rather than considering only percentages of
| unemployed/employed to set rates for Unemployment
| Insurance, they could also add a "capriciousness" factor
| for events like this. Or, they could also require funds be
| provided for continuing education for those laid off. Heck,
| they could also just make a basic adjustment for the
| inherent bias in the Unemployment Insurance rates against
| small biz, where a single layoff/firing has a huge negative
| effect on your rates, more than firing 100 people for a
| medium-sized company.
|
| But of course, for the "libertarians", this is evil
| regulation.
| freedomben wrote:
| Your comment was pretty good, but didn't need the weird
| potshot at libertarians at the end.
|
| What your comment touched on though is how the companies
| already are "punished" in a way for it because it affects
| their unemployment insurance rates. That was established
| as a way to balance the needs of the company (unintended
| bad consequences happen to unemployment rates when you
| tie the hands of firing) with the needs of the people who
| are affected. Arguing that the balance is off seems like
| a much different argument than GP though.
| ActionHank wrote:
| Just remember they signed Joe Rogan for over 200 million and
| he's not brought in nearly that amount for them.
|
| Did they retrench the people who made that decision? Did they
| retrench the management who approved that contract?
|
| Spotify employees should be pushing for some degree of
| corporate and fiscal responsibility given they are retrenching,
| but they still gave Joe the bag.
| weebull wrote:
| Are you missing a "not"? Otherwise you're not making sense.
| ActionHank wrote:
| Thank you!
| rsanek wrote:
| i feel like this is a pretty hard thing to assess without
| access to internal metrics
| phpisthebest wrote:
| Under What metric do you apply that? What goals did they have
| for his program?
|
| My understanding was the purpose of buying Joe Rogan was 2
| fold, one of course is to bring in new users, but that was
| not the only goal (maybe not even the primary goal) the other
| goal was to get more of their current users to have more
| listen time on podcasts and less on Music, they pay far far
| far far less for podcasts (in many cases nothing) than they
| do for Music.
|
| If they were able to shift the total listen time it could
| have more than paid for Rogan even with out new subscribers
|
| The contract is up for renewal very soon so if they drop him
| we know he did not meet their objectives. Somehow I bet they
| renew
| bogomipz wrote:
| They also signed a deal with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry
| that was worth 20 million. They agreed to part ways in June.
| I'm guessing the reason was that it failed to deliver
| financially. See:
|
| https://archive.is/Hgh3V
| tomatocracy wrote:
| Reportedly only a fraction of this sum was actually paid
| out though.
| bogomipz wrote:
| A "fraction" of 20 million is still a lot of salary
| runway though. They were paid out on 2.5 years worth of
| that 20 million dollar deal. Even if their deal's earn
| out was only million dollars a year for 20 years it would
| be 2.5 million. Of course no earn out period is that long
| so it's likely they were paid out much more than that.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Unless you are pretty high up at Spotify, you have literally
| no idea how much Joe Rogan has brought in for them. His
| podcast has been number one on the platform since it
| launched.
| teg4n_ wrote:
| Personally, I cancelled my Spotify premium family plan over
| it. I doubt I'm the only one.
| gnicholas wrote:
| OTOH, the only reason I ever downloaded the Spotify app
| was because there was an episode of that show that I
| wanted to listen to, and it wasn't available anywhere
| else.
| jaywalk wrote:
| I guarantee you're not the only one. Do you think Spotify
| brought on someone like Rogan without considering protest
| cancellations?
| qzx_pierri wrote:
| I suspect you didn't cancel your subscription because of
| Joe Rogan being given a deal at Spotify.
|
| I think you cancelled your subscription so you could TELL
| people you cancelled your subscription as a result of Joe
| Rogan being given a deal at Spotify.
| niceice wrote:
| What people say vs what they do:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/modernwarfare2/comments/1733bhk/
| im_...
| CDRdude wrote:
| Is that a useful distinction? In both cases, the event
| that eventually resulted in a canceled subscription was
| giving Joe Rogan a Spotify deal.
| qzx_pierri wrote:
| The second option is mildly insufferable, and a very
| transparent way to grift upvotes from other like minded
| contrarians addicted to trendy knee-jerk alarmism.
|
| Me, pointing this out, might also be a bit insufferable,
| but I guess I just enjoy pointing these things out,
| because everyone who uses this site is so intelligent (on
| average).
|
| It sucks seeing such intelligent people get caught up in
| these pits of cognitive dissonance.
| ziddoap wrote:
| What's the difference, and who does that difference
| matter to?
|
| To Spotify, it's still a cancelled subscription and the
| root cause is still Joe.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| No the second is the person was going to cancel anyway
| and Joe provides a rather weak and pathetic way to virtue
| signal to a very minor political in group they are "with
| them" while doing something they were going to do anyway
| teg4n_ wrote:
| I haven't told anyone in person I did, but the fact you
| think I did it to virtue signal says more about you than
| me.
|
| And if I was doing it to "grift internet points" nothing
| stops me from just lying.
|
| Some people do things because they genuinely believe it's
| the right (or at least less bad) thing to do.
| generalpf wrote:
| Likewise.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| Where you the only one. no..
|
| Are you in an extreme minority that was likely far offset
| by new members... yes
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| > Just remember they signed Joe Rogan for over 200 million
| and he's not brought in nearly that amount for them.
|
| The fact that they signed Joe for that amount, and continued
| to air everything throughout all the controversies,
| throughout all the COVID years, and through some artist
| departures over him, signals that he has more than recouped
| that investment for them.
|
| https://www.newsweek.com/joe-rogan-more-popular-ever-
| statist...
| pm90 wrote:
| > Innovate sure, but don't fill up your tank when gas is cheap
| just to do doughnuts in the parking lot.
|
| Thats a nice ideal, but its not something that the companies
| are made to consider seriously. To them, cheap capital signals
| an opportunity to juice up their growth numbers, and expensive
| capital signals an opportunity to cut problematic employees
| from the team (and keep others on their toes).
|
| Until there are real consequences these companies will not
| change.
| chasely wrote:
| I read it more like "we hired when money was cheap and were
| hoping that we could create some new revenue streams but that
| didn't work out and now we don't have much hope of revenue
| growth in these areas so we have to reduce costs."
| kamikaz1k wrote:
| That is how it should be read, because this is how these
| companies operate. My company's CFO was talking about this as
| we pushed for profitability (since the market expectations
| changed) and rationale for investment was exactly like you
| said.
|
| "It's our job to grow, profitably, so if we think we can
| generate more than what we spend, we can invest. But if its
| not working, we will cut it."
|
| Unless you have a specific reason to believe it to be
| otherwise.
| fullshark wrote:
| What's the consequence for doing your employees a disservice?
| Maybe a few of the best and most important employees get jaded
| and quit. Morale company wide takes a hit. These companies
| don't seem to care and I guess I'm not sure they should.
|
| For me, it's not just morale that's gone to shit, but I feel
| like I've woken up to the nature of the employer/employee
| relationship with all these layoffs. I was blind but now I see,
| we ARE human resources, and it's very likely none of us are
| irreplaceable, none of us matter really all that much to our
| employers and the cost cutting via offshoring/remote employee
| replacement / no backfill is probably just getting started.
| weebull wrote:
| The flip side is that these people had a good job for a few
| years, and can hopefully springboard on. The alternative is
| that they weren't hired by Spotify, or potentially at all.
|
| As long as they were hired in good faith, and not to just see
| which people worked out, I don't have a problem.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| >As long as they were hired in good faith
|
| I think that's the OP's point. They were not hired in good
| faith and I agree. This mass hiring/firing cycle is playing
| games with people's lives and, as always, the people at the
| top are unaffected by it, and in fact maybe rewarded for
| it. This isn't a game, this is people's lives. It's a
| little less horrible if it's a remote position but people
| upend their lives and move for jobs all the time.
| zucked wrote:
| I don't think there's any particular malice to the ups
| and downs - it's just the nature of work these days.
| Employers _and_ employees have pretty much laid bare
| their view that the other is simply a cog in their
| machine. That being true, folks need to understand, plan
| for, and not be particularly surprised when these ups and
| downs happen. That means having a runway for lean times,
| and knowing your worth, how to communicate it, and being
| flexible when things go pear-shaped. People do move for
| jobs all the time, yes, but I hope that part of the
| planning for that involves asking the question - "what
| happens if this job evaporates?"
| hx8 wrote:
| I agree. The employees got a lot out of the trade. Money,
| experience, connections. In addition, anyone participating
| in the tech economy should be aware of the boom/bust cycles
| that have plagued its history. It shouldn't be a surprise
| to anyone that a tech company had a large round of layoffs.
| The employees should have been aware of the risks when they
| signed on.
| nyokodo wrote:
| > we ARE human resources, and it's very likely none of us are
| irreplaceable, none of us matter really all that much to our
| employers
|
| Now, remember this the next time you're tempted to lose
| sleep, sacrifice family time or leisure for your employer and
| then act accordingly.
| fullshark wrote:
| It's not just that, most of us are knowledge workers, think
| about how many hours off the clock you spent trying to
| solve some business problem. Why aren't you enjoying your
| kid's soccer game and instead thinking about that problem
| at work? To make your upcoming work day easier, or is it
| because you're spending many many more hours on the clock
| actually, working for your employer?
|
| When employers wanted your body, it was a lot easier to
| have separation between work and home life, but now that
| employers want your mind, that separation is incredibly
| illdefined for most of us I think. I used to give that time
| freely but now I wonder what's the point.
| munksbeer wrote:
| This is very true. I spend a lot of time thinking about
| work problems. On the one hand it does help me in some
| ways because those problems are there whether I like it
| or not and I don't seem to have the control to stop
| thinking about them. So it does help that sometimes I'll
| settle on a vague solution in my head before I fall
| asleep at night, but of course it would be better not to
| have to do this at all.
|
| I have at times had idle daydreams about doing a job that
| ends at the end of the work-day and you literally do not
| have to think about it again. I'd say those sort of jobs
| are not well paid these days.
| querez wrote:
| > I feel like I've woken up to the nature of the
| employer/employee relationship with all these layoffs. I was
| blind but now I see, we ARE human resources
|
| I think that's just a normal process of growing older. Also:
| yes, of course you are a resource to your employer. An
| annoying one (stell or laptops don't usually talk back and
| has demands). I also don't think there's anything wrong with
| companies behaving this way. By all intents, purposes and
| employment contracts, it was always meant to be a "work for
| payment" type deals, nothing more. Of course, ideally your
| interests and the companies' align beyond that narrow scope;
| e.g. you're both interested in you becoming an expert in X,
| or in solving problems in area Y. But it really comes down to
| you being a resource for the company to produce stuff.
| Thinking back I realized that my elders and mentors and
| everyone worth listening to always tries to tell me that
| (e.g. by telling me "you're not your job", "look out for your
| WLB, noone else will", "a job is just a means to an end", "HR
| protects the company, not you", "always keep in mind that
| you're disposable"...). And yet it seems to be a lesion that
| everyone needs to rediscover for themselves eventually.
| gtirloni wrote:
| _> By all intents, purposes and employment contracts, it
| was always meant to be a "work for payment" type deals,
| nothing more_
|
| That's exactly the opposite of what 99% of the companies
| sell to candidates. You must have seen stuff like this is a
| great place work, join the family, etc. So maybe you mean
| the hidden intent was that but that's not the message being
| broadcasted.
| geodel wrote:
| Well this is same for 99% products advertised on media.
| No one really take it at their face value. So why is
| employment advertising/selling is expected to be factual.
| fullshark wrote:
| People want to be seduced, it's why you said 99%, some
| percent of advertising works on all of us, and a major
| decision like "this is my job and how I spend most of my
| waking hours on this earth" is ripe for the employee to
| accept the seduction.
| ctoth wrote:
| >Well this is same for 99% products advertised on media.
| No one really take it at their face value. So why is
| employment advertising/selling is expected to be factual.
|
| Advertisers have somehow gotten away with lying to you
| for your whole life, so obviously it's your fault your
| employer did too!
|
| Just ... What?
| 0xEFF wrote:
| No company reflects "we're family" in contracts or
| compensation packages. That fact alone tells us the
| message is and always has been bullshit.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| In fact they will try to terminate hires or reject
| candidates who express primary interest in work being
| "for payment". Every business looks for an edge,
| including exploitability checks (and checks against
| disrupting that line of thought for their other hires)
| querez wrote:
| Of course it is. That's why I'm pointing out that
| everyone learns the lesson eventually. If it were obvious
| from the outset it wouldn't require learning. If it was
| easy to discover, it would be learned immediately. But as
| it stands, it's a difficult thing to learn because it's
| not in the employer's interest: they definitely do want
| people who are are better aligned with the goals of the
| company outside of "work for payment". They want people
| that are passionate about the job and the company,
| because ceteris paribus those people will do a better
| job. And a way of getting there is trying to be a company
| worth working for. To have a good culture, great goals,
| or great colleagues. But taking a more cynical view,
| that's just a different form of payment, in the sense
| that 60k/year at a great place to work is probably worth
| more to you than 70k/year at a not-so-great job. But as
| soon as a company enters some hardship and needs to cut
| cost, it needs to take a sober and realistic look at its
| expenses. And personal costs tend to be a huge expense.
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| "The graveyards are full of indispensable men(/women)"
|
| It doesn't matter how important or irreplaceable you think
| you might be - life/businesses/people will carry on without
| you.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Even if you THINK you are indispensable, even if you are
| 100% CORRECT that you ARE indispensable, plenty of gamblers
| exist in management, and will happily try and route around
| you. Maybe it doesn't work out every time, but it works out
| often enough to encourage companies to keep doing it.
|
| It's so much easier to fire one person than the entire
| department. It's really hard for your manager to replace
| you when your coworkers say "naw we aren't doing their work
| without being paid their salary". And guess what? If you're
| a cunt, unions can, you know, not strike! They can 100%
| stand by as someone gets fucked over. Ask any member of a
| teachers union.
|
| Companies don't jettison entire profitable divisions of the
| company to kill Unions in the crib (walmart) because they
| DON'T get the workers a larger slice of the pie lol.
| Companies don't play you anti-union propaganda on your
| training day because unions mean they pay less for talented
| workers lol. If unions truly reduced the price of real
| talent, companies would start unions themselves!
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > none of us are irreplaceable
|
| But the smart ones know now to be as irreplaceable as
| possible, however they have to.
| I_Am_Nous wrote:
| Be careful though, my father in law has told stories about
| people who made themselves irreplaceable by being the only
| person who can fix a machine because they allegedly fixed
| it in a way that breaks often enough that they can be the
| hero. A stain like that on your resume means your burned
| trust for potentially short term gains and may find trust
| is not given as easily as a result.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| Actually doesn't matter if you do or if you don't, since
| it can't be proven. What matters is whether or not
| somebody accuses you of "fixing it in a way that it
| breaks".
| I_Am_Nous wrote:
| In this case it was apparently proven enough that the
| place wanted to fire the person, the union said "you
| can't fire him but you can escort him out and tell him
| never to come back" so being accused is just the tripwire
| that brings the rocks down. Don't pile rocks up there in
| the first place and there aren't rocks to fall!
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > I was blind but now I see, we ARE human resources, and it's
| very likely none of us are irreplaceable, none of us matter
| really all that much to our employers...
|
| Interestingly, there was a really good article in the NY
| times yesterday that made that exact point: https://www.nytim
| es.com/2023/12/03/business/economy/doctors-...
|
| Basically, the article was talking about how being a doctor
| or pharmacist used to be a very respected profession, and
| most doctors/pharmacists didn't previously see the need to
| unionize. With all the consolidation that's gone on in
| medicine over the past couple decades, though (the article
| talks about how many of them used to be partners in small
| doctor groups, that is increasingly rare these days), they
| now realize they're wage slaves just like the rest of us, and
| their management has been treating them like interchangeable
| widgets to squeeze the most productivity out of.
|
| If _doctors_ are unionizing, maybe software developers should
| rethink their historical aversion to the idea.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Quite a stretch from "This company hired too many people
| and ended up having to lay off some" and "Hmm, maybe we're
| not as irreplaceable as we like to think" to "Let's all
| make ourselves less attractive to our employers by
| threatening to gang up on them."
|
| But I guess unionization is the universal solvent for every
| HR problem around here.
| 4iuvosvjf23 wrote:
| How is that a stretch? If we're not irreplaceable then
| ganging up on our employers is a way for us to reclaim
| some of the leverage in this transaction that we lose by
| being replaceable.
| dingnuts wrote:
| it's not even ganging up, it's just hiring a middleman to
| do your negotiation for you, and they take a cut.
|
| I'm good
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > it's just hiring a middleman to do your negotiation for
| you, and they take a cut.
|
| That's a bad take. I can understand reasons for not
| wanting to join a union, but that's a pretty ridiculous
| assessment of what goes on.
|
| The thing is, all of us like to believe we're special
| snowflakes and uniquely valuable. What many are realizing
| is that some of the only real power most of have is if we
| act collectively. It's not just "a middle man doing the
| negotiation for you", it's union members acting
| _together_ , and organizing that way, that gives unions
| any power at all.
|
| Just look at the recent Hollywood strikes - the only
| reason they got anywhere is the strong power of their
| unions (e.g. union members aren't allowed to work for
| _any_ struck employer, worldwide, while a strike is
| ongoing). And actors and writers really _do_ have special
| snowflakes, the big stars that make millions per film,
| and they 're all union members, too.
| explaininjs wrote:
| Don't forget all the "oh yeah I'm not allowed to fix
| that, that's a CSS bug and I'm a JS Developer. You'll
| need to bring in a CSS development team to look at that
| one".
| eropple wrote:
| You understand that that only happens in unions _when the
| union assents to those divisions_ , right? You understand
| that _you get to vote about whether your union operates
| that way_?
| explaininjs wrote:
| You understand you've removed all personal agency from
| the worker? They must now do what the thousands of others
| have decided is best for their job security, not what
| that individual actually wants to do. My gf used to be a
| split artist/technical person at her job, she loved it.
| It got unionized, and now: "Sorry bub, union says you
| aren't allowed to make art any more. Keep your head down
| and script your scripts, we're getting a real artist for
| the other parts. Oh yeah and it will be way more work to
| integrate with them than if you were doing the full
| stack, but we still want it done in the same amount of
| time so work late or whatever. Thanks!"
| eropple wrote:
| If that's an accurate representation of what happened,
| that sounds like a shitty union that's insufficiently
| understanding of the reality that efficiencies improve
| the bottom line in ways that workers can benefit from,
| too. Maybe, then, one should engage in that dreaded
| _politics_ and make it better--because on the flip side,
| "personal agency" for a worker is just as likely to be
| "RTO and work late and no raises this year".
|
| Only outliers ever win by atomization--and as somebody
| with a track record of being an outlier and operating
| successfully in atomized environments, I'd certainly
| rather not have my entire technical career be a high-wire
| act because companies can get away with it!
| explaininjs wrote:
| I do not know what RTO is, but her union is certainly
| shitty - and still doesn't give raises. And your advice
| of "in addition to taking on the job of training these
| artists, and doing extra work to integrate with their
| sub-par assets, you should take on the job of a
| politician too, then you'd see how great unions are!"
| doesn't really gel. Some people want to just have a
| conversation with their boss about what work they want,
| not take up three new jobs they don't want because "The
| Guild" gave them a shitty contract.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _If we 're not irreplaceable then ganging up on our
| employers is a way for us to reclaim some of the
| leverage_
|
| Let's say I have a company with an R&D budget of $1
| billion. $100 million goes into robotics and AI, $900
| million goes into core business interests. You form a
| union and demand all kinds of ridiculous accommodations
| that you could never have reasonably asked for on your
| own.
|
| What will happen when budgeting for the next fiscal year?
| Replacing you _is_ a core business interest now, and so
| is avoiding the need to hire your replacement. The R &D
| budget will be adjusted accordingly.
|
| If you want "leverage," the best way to achieve that is
| to make yourself more valuable, not less.
| computronus wrote:
| > demand all kinds of ridiculous accommodations that you
| could never have reasonably asked for on your own
|
| The union oughtn't seek "ridiculous" accommodations then.
| It should seek at least reasonable ones, and possible
| aspirational ones, and negotiate it out from there. The
| problem we're seeing now is that even demands that most
| would find reasonable are cast as ridiculous by
| management. And if a union has trouble getting employers
| to listen, there's no hope that someone on their own can.
|
| I've personally lost faith that a typical employer is
| capable of recognizing the value of an individual
| employee. So many of the recent layoffs have not
| accounted for individual performance or criticality to
| the business (Twitter's being a good example). So my own
| value isn't as strong of a bargaining chip.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _So many of the recent layoffs have not accounted for
| individual performance or criticality to the business_
|
| And you think a union will?
|
| Unions make more sense when the workers actually are
| interchangeable. Are you?
| computronus wrote:
| It doesn't matter, if my employer would treat me as
| interchangeable anyway.
|
| And even interchangeable employees deserve reasonable
| accommodations. I do think a union can highlight those
| needs more effectively than individuals (especially for
| interchangeable ones, to your point).
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > If you want "leverage," the best way to achieve that is
| to make yourself more valuable, not less.
|
| In today's world, making yourself valuable gives you a
| pat on the back, maybe a pizza party and a $25 Chipotle
| gift card if your employer is generous.
|
| CEOs are sitting on massive piles of money while telling
| workers that their greed is bad for the economy.
| 4iuvosvjf23 wrote:
| Presumably the union should calibrate its demands to the
| point where the cost to the employer is lower than the
| cost of replacing the workers but higher than what they
| get without the union.
|
| Surely there is some room there. If the cost of labor
| were already equal to the cost of replacing the labor,
| then the employer might as well just replace them now. So
| it must be lower by some amount. The point of a union (it
| seems to me) is to capture a larger portion of that
| surplus, but leave the employer with enough that the
| arrangement is still worthwhile.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > If you want "leverage," the best way to achieve that is
| to make yourself more valuable, not less.
|
| This is really irrespective of union membership.
| Sometimes people have this odd view of unions as "Now
| you're basically consigning yourself to 'lowest common
| denominator' employee", but that need not be the case.
| There are many unions that have vastly different pay
| scales and include "stars" (think actors' unions, sports
| players' unions, etc.) Even Tom Cruise joined the
| negotiations as a SAG member, and my guess is he's got
| plenty of leverage all by himself:
| https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/07/tom-cruise-
| repo...
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| One thing the Hollywood people have in common with each
| other, but not with us, is that they move from one
| employer to the next frequently as a matter of course.
| Those employers explicitly do NOT want to carry them on
| their books when they don't have specific jobs for them
| to perform.
|
| Unionization makes a lot more sense in those cases. If I
| need a ship unloaded, I call up some dockworkers. If I
| need some heavy boxes moved, I call up some Teamsters. If
| I need someone to look good on a screen, I call up Tom
| Cruise or Jennifer Lawrence. If I need someone to feed
| the actors, I call the craft union. Etc. Like the old
| joke about hookers, I don't pay these people to come to
| work, I pay them to go away.
|
| None of that is comparable to what I do, or (probably) to
| what you do. Your employer can only become less
| competitive if you join a separate outside organization
| that acts as a middleman for your labor. That's not the
| case in other industries.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| That's certainly not the case with all unions like that,
| e.g. sport players' unions, where a player works for a
| team for a couple of years, then may go to another team,
| or (an area where I'm familiar) AGMA, the American Guild
| of Musical Artists, where many union members are employed
| by the same dance or opera company for years, sometimes
| their entire career.
| I_Am_Nous wrote:
| If Human Resources are just replaceable resources, you
| don't care about them outside of what they can do for
| you. If a company is consistently failing to recognize
| their employees as people who deserve dignity, maybe a
| collective group is necessary to ensure they start to.
| This can be government based or be a private union, but
| companies don't usually make changes beneficial to
| employees without some kind of outside pressure.
| ctoth wrote:
| I'm just trying to understand why on earth you wrote
| "gang up" here.
|
| The corporation has an HR department. Usually, this
| consists of more than one person. The corporation has a
| hell of a lot more money, legal resources, (money is
| speech, my friend) and so on than you do. Why isn't it
| obvious... the most natural thing in the world... That
| you would also want more than just you on your side?
|
| This is like saying "why did you join an army instead of
| just fighting the bad guys single-handed?"
|
| I must be missing something here, because you said this
| and everybody just went along with it like "oh yeah why
| would we do that? when this seems like asking "Why did
| you start a company with your friend to gang up on that
| new project you guys were talking about instead of just
| doing it yourself?" Totally, completely confused.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| I've been lucky, I guess. I've never felt like I was
| working for the "bad guys."
| jodrellblank wrote:
| As usual, the anti-union argument on HN is "The rest of
| you shouldn't put up lion defenses to protect you because
| I'm strong enough to fight off a lion and the fences
| would just get in my way".
|
| Hopefully for you, your luck holds, and you never get
| ill/weak/sick/unable to fight lions. Like everyone else
| does eventually.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| (Shrug) The site is run by a VC fund, and is
| intentionally (but increasingly ineffectively) geared
| towards an audience of people interested in, or actively
| working on, startup companies. Is this really the best
| place to sell the whole "dark Satanic mills" schtick?
| sheepybloke wrote:
| One of the big things I saw when a company I worked at did
| layoffs was that more people left voluntarily than were
| fired, especially a lot of the people I saw as the best and
| brightest. Heck, it's why I left. To me, that's the biggest
| side affect of the layoffs. There's going to be a brain
| drain, not because you fired people, but because the morale
| and mental of the company has shifted.
| svarcoe wrote:
| And they were still hiring too! My first day was last Monday
| haha, last day today
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| That's so messed up when companies do that. Curious what your
| separation package was?
| bogomipz wrote:
| Wait, you were hired and laid off in the same week? I'm
| really sorry that happened to you. The fact that that was
| allowed to happen suggests a very dysfunctional and
| incompetent management culture.
| pgwhalen wrote:
| I agree it's not a fun situation, but I'm curious what you
| expect to have happened instead. What would the "competent
| management" version of the situation look like?
| bogomipz wrote:
| In a competent management culture plans of impending
| downsizing would have been communicated to hiring
| managers and they would have adjusted their open reqs. It
| is not uncommon to be told during the interview process
| that a role has been frozen. It's personally happened to
| me on 3 occasions.
| Solvency wrote:
| What team. What role.
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| Hope they gave you a fat severance package
| falcolas wrote:
| You're kinder than I am, ascribing an actual staffing problem
| to their layoffs. All I see and hear these days is, "We want to
| bump up our share prices, and it's easiest to just lay off some
| people."
| gizmo wrote:
| Who is "they"? Spotify executives who assumed the money printer
| would never run out of ink? The managers who hired and hired to
| expand their own empire? The software engineers who engaged in
| "resume driven development" by stacking abstractions on top of
| abstractions so they could play with cool new tech at work?
|
| There is a lot of opportunism out there.
| vkou wrote:
| Top blame is on middle-management (100+ reports), because
| they set the rules-in-practice for how the organization
| actually operates, and second blame goes to top management
| (C-level), because their job is to keep the middle-management
| in check.
|
| The line employees are just responding to the incentives that
| these two groups create, they aren't the ones steering the
| ship into the ground.
|
| Any significant layoff that doesn't have a disproportionate
| number of people from those two groups thrown overboard is
| ass-covering. They are the ones who screwed up.
| potamic wrote:
| In what I've seen, this generally comes from top
| management, the board even in some cases. They set the
| agenda and approve budgets for everything the company does.
| Head count is a direct translation of this. In normal
| scenarios, head count becomes the bottleneck and limits how
| many things can be taken up for a given year. But during
| the pandemic, dollars became plenty and execs reached
| deeper into their wish list and triggered a hiring frenzy.
| Middle management rarely has a say in these matters. They
| only need to come up with plans that can ultimately fulfill
| management's agenda.
| vkou wrote:
| > In what I've seen, this generally comes from top
| management, the board even in some cases. They set the
| agenda and approve budgets for everything the company
| does.
|
| They do, but they are often blind, due to fog of war, of
| what _actually_ happens in their firm.
|
| Middle management controls that - by deciding on what
| kind of line-work (which they have visibility over) gets
| rewarded or prioritized. If the line engineers are
| spinning their wheels, doing architecture-astonaut
| nonsense for the sake of promotion, that's not because
| the CTO is rewarding it - it's because their 100-person
| director (who should at least vaguely know what each of
| their reports is doing this year) is.
| emodendroket wrote:
| It's hard to know what's "responsible" when you're operating a
| business at a loss in the hopes of becoming profitable
| eventually and then it just keeps going for years and years
| without making money.
| dsaavy wrote:
| A business by definition is not a valuable and transferrable
| business if every single person (including the C-suite) cannot
| be replaced without the business collapsing.
|
| No one is immune to this or an exception. Top to bottom.
| coredog64 wrote:
| > In my opinion they did these employees a disservice by hiring
| them in the first place.
|
| These people got a high(er)? paying job during the period, have
| a well known company on their resume, and are being let go
| during a layoff such that no blame is assigned to their exit.
| What's not to like?
| michaelt wrote:
| If they knew that was what they were getting into, great.
|
| On the other hand, if I hire a guy, he quits a secure job, he
| moves his family all the way across the country, and then 3
| months later I fire him because I changed my mind about what
| I need? That guy is absolutely not going to thank me.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Yes, it depends on those factors. One other factor is what
| would have happened at his old job. I have a friend who
| went from one big tech company to another was then laid off
| recently. There's a good chance the result would have been
| the same either way, since the first company cut a lot as
| well.
|
| One factor that keeps people at a company is the knowledge
| that, all things equal, last hired is first fired. It's not
| hard and fast, but you tend to have fewer allies at a
| company you just joined, making you more susceptible. When
| someone decides to leave one company and join a new one,
| they know that they're giving up this advantage.
| hk1337 wrote:
| I remember comments clamoring how great Spotify was going to be
| because of their European roots compared to Apple (Music) a
| U.S. company.
| boringg wrote:
| If we put ourselves back into the shoes of 2019-2020 there were
| people who were talking about a post-capital world because
| money was so cheap.
|
| I'm not defending all the companies that hired quickly - but if
| you all recall it did seem like the world had changed
| significantly with way more use of technology. I believe the
| underlying bet was once everyone uses these tools people will
| inevitably keep using them. Coupled that with cheap money (for
| the past decade) and incredibly fast growth and no-one thinking
| that the rates were going to go up at least not in the near
| future.
|
| I find it hard to act so certain and so clearsighted that
| companies were acting in bad faith as you seem to point to.
| mrcwinn wrote:
| There is still no crystal ball. You take the opportunities as
| they are presented, especially given that your competitors are
| doing the same. Where exactly was your commentary on Spotify's
| business when times were better, urging them to leave more
| people without jobs?
| wesapien wrote:
| Put a cost to unwanted behavior and make people think twice
| with siding with Moloch
| Aaargh20318 wrote:
| > All I hear is "We hired for the sake of hiring when money was
| cheap and we wanted to signal 'growth'
|
| In a healthy company, I would expect every employee to
| contribute to the bottom line, either directly or indirectly.
| They hired these people because they needed them to do a job, a
| job that somehow helps making the company money.
|
| As such, unless there are sudden significant changes to the
| market and product (which as far as I can tell is not the case
| here), firing employees should result in lower revenues. After
| all, employees generate more money than they cost, that's the
| entire point of employees.
|
| This leaves me with a bunch of questions when I read things
| like this:
|
| 1) If the company can get by without these people, what were
| they doing in the first place? 2) If these people did not
| contribute to the bottom line (directly or indirectly) what was
| the point in hiring them? 3) If they _did_ contribute, why let
| them go?
| yCombLinks wrote:
| I've been a spotify subscriber for over a decade. Every
| single update has made the windows version worse at least.
| They've rebuilt and redesigned it repeatedly, for whose
| benefit I don't know. Obviously that is just the app side
| part of the whole org.
| butlike wrote:
| The 2011 app with blatant iframes partitioning the sections
| of the app was peak Spotify Desktop, imo
| sbarre wrote:
| I feel the same way, and wonder if it's just product and UX
| teams justifying their existence?
|
| As a paying customer I don't appreciate being a beta tester
| for some random UI fiddling.
|
| Never mind that I have things forced on me like podcasts
| and audiobooks that I will _never_ engage with on Spotify,
| and that I can 't simply hide...
| crazygringo wrote:
| This is completely backwards.
|
| They _didn 't_ hire "for the sake of hiring" -- they hired
| _specifically_ to build up their podcasting and audiobook
| efforts, which were totally new products within the app. Which
| they thought were essential to staying competitive -- e.g. what
| if people start moving over to Amazon instead with its
| Music+Wondery+Audible, or other competitors?
|
| Now it's turned out those bets haven't been as successful as
| they wanted, so they're keeping them but massively scaling back
| on future investment. Which means they don't need those
| employees anymore.
|
| Honestly, what do you expect Spotify to do? _Not_ try to stay
| competitive, and risk a competitor taking their place, and then
| go the way of Pandora? Do you think it 's wrong to hire teams
| to build products when you hope the products will succeed but
| you can't know 100% for sure?
|
| This is just how normal, healthy business goes. You make bets,
| sometimes they succeed wildly, and sometimes they don't. When
| they don't, it often results in layoffs because there's not
| enough profit to keep paying those employees with, and there
| isn't immediately any new product for them to work on.
|
| Believe me, a company with profit margins as thin as Spotify's
| can't afford to "hire for the sake of hiring". That's just not
| how it works.
| jebarker wrote:
| > Honestly, what do you expect Spotify to do?
|
| Innovate to grow, if growth is the objective. For example,
| they could better serve the audiophile market with higher
| quality offerings. Not as much growth there though.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| And how does that help them make more money if they still
| have to always give the record label more money?
| jebarker wrote:
| How does innovation help them make more money? In the
| case of higher quality, they can charge more. There are
| premium services such as TIDAL doing that.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| And if they charge more for the relative few people who
| want it, the record label still gets 70% of the revenue.
| They have to do something that is not dependent on music
| licensing.
| jebarker wrote:
| My point still stands. They chose the path of trying to
| get market share from incumbents in the podcast and
| audiobook market rather than trying to innovate in their
| core music business and that has cost them in multiple
| ways.
| distances wrote:
| I don't even know what the incumbents are. I had never
| listened to a podcast before they came to Spotify. So I
| can easily imagine there was a big untapped market of
| getting people to spend more time with podcasts, which I
| assume is much cheaper for Spotify than music licensing.
| So more customers and less royalties -- I can see a
| potential in that.
| 93po wrote:
| same way netflix does - make their own label
| bogomipz wrote:
| I agree in theory but practically this is a non-starter
| as the big 3 record companies are also investors in the
| company. Even if they weren't however the downside risks
| of the big 3 not agreeing to renegotiate licensing in the
| future would be catastrophic to Spotify. This is where I
| think Tidal got it right both in terms of a business
| model and something that was good for artists. It's a
| shame what became of Tidal.
| koevet wrote:
| What happened to Tidal? I'm a user and swiched to Tidal
| because I was done waiting for Spotify hi-fi.
| bogomipz wrote:
| Tidal was sold to Block. The sale itself was somewhat
| controversial and there was a lawsuit filed as a result,
| albeit unsuccessful. See:
|
| https://www.reuters.com/legal/judge-dismisses-lawsuit-
| over-b...
|
| I also think that alot of those Tidal jobs were probably
| eliminated in Block's own layoffs. See:
|
| https://sfstandard.com/2023/11/08/block-square-cashapp-
| layof...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > this is a non-starter as the big 3 record companies are
| also investors in the company.
|
| The big 3 record companies have negligible investments in
| Spotify:
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SPOT/holders/
|
| Even if they did have a non negligible interest in
| Spotify, that is not the reason it is a non starter. It
| is a nonstarter because everyone wants to listen to music
| owned by the big 3 record companies.
|
| Insufficient people are going to be interested in paying
| for a music streaming service without Michael Jackson,
| Sinatra, and a whole bunch of other big names and old
| songs that span decades. And people want to listen to
| music on demand, and repetitively. People are not going
| to be signing up for 1 month at a time like video
| streaming businesses, because people do not consume music
| the same way as video.
| bogomipz wrote:
| >"The big 3 record companies have negligible investments
| in Spotify":
|
| This was not always the case however. The big 3
| historically had interest at over 6% and they took money
| off the table only recently. [1]
|
| >"Even if they did have a non negligible interest in
| Spotify, that is not the reason it is a non starter. It
| is a nonstarter because everyone wants to listen to music
| owned by the big 3 record companies."
|
| Yes we are saying the exact same. I clearly stated that
| losing that licensing would be catastrophic.
|
| [1] https://archive.is/KaI0X
| buro9 wrote:
| They placed a bet, and that bet didn't pay off.
|
| But what I'd expect is for them to cut only a little (not
| 17%), because they would place another bet on something else
| to remain competitive.
|
| To cut so heavily looks like they've no great idea on the
| next bet that they could make, that they don't believe those
| people they hired could contribute towards another thing in
| the near future (or they have no runway to explore doing so).
|
| Companies should place bets to stay relevant and grow, this
| looks like there isn't a big bet now.
| kojeovo wrote:
| Interesting way to look at it, a bet. A bet involving
| people's livelivehoods.
| explaininjs wrote:
| A bet involving paying people a salary for as long as is
| feasible? Cool!
| r3d0c wrote:
| and destroying their future plans they might have set in
| motion that will be derailed because of management's
| incompetance, they don't have money that much money to
| float on specially in this economy where everything is
| overpriced, almost like they are humans with their own
| histories and possibly other people depending on them,
| did you really try and consider their perspective or was
| dehumanizing them your first instinct?
|
| but i doubt management will be fired will it? they'll end
| up with nice fat stacks of bonuses for making terrible
| business decisions
|
| keep defending the real incompetants though
| explaininjs wrote:
| Believe me, I have very very close experience with what
| it's like to go through layoffs, and I feel for those who
| have just now realized that nothing in this world is
| guaranteed.
|
| But griping that management should have kept paying
| salaries when the money wasn't there won't get anyone
| anywhere. Take your severance, hone your skills, apply
| for jobs. If you can, maybe take some time to go on a
| trip. Life will go on.
| morelisp wrote:
| > when the money wasn't there
|
| What about when the money is there? Spotify is
| profitable.
| explaininjs wrote:
| Barely, and only after their previous layoffs this year.
| morelisp wrote:
| ... so the money is there.
| explaininjs wrote:
| And it will be when they rehire later :)
| nkohari wrote:
| Companies don't stay profitable by investing in
| unprofitable markets, though. If they don't think this
| approach is going to work out long-term, they should stop
| spending money on it, even if that means reducing
| headcount.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > or was dehumanizing them your first instinct?
|
| This is a really poor approach to discourse. I imagine
| you don't really think that every job must last forever.
| Jobs come and go, and working them means we can live and
| make choices. It's not fun being laid off (I have been),
| but it's just life.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > A bet involving people's livelivehoods.
|
| Giving the employment market another livelihood option
| was the bet.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| People should know that know job is permanent and plan
| accordingly. Do you really expect to work at one company
| the rest of your career and get a gold watch and a
| pension ?
| fragmede wrote:
| It's worth noting that. Sweden, where Spotify is based,
| still does that whole pension thing, so culturally,
| relatively, actually yes.
| fisf wrote:
| That is entirely correct. But it also implies that
| employees need to price that uncertainty into their
| salary demands.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Exactly
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Do they not? American salaries sire much higher than
| european ones with more job security for example.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| You're stating obvious things.
| checkyoursudo wrote:
| But why shouldn't we expect to be able to work for one
| company and earn a gold watch (at some anniversary date,
| I guess?) and a pension?
|
| It used to work that way. Why not now? It worked that way
| for my grandpa. It looked like it was going to work that
| way for my dad, until the corporate world did its huge
| pension rug-pulls. But it could still work that way.
|
| I have a pension now (Sweden). My wife has one (Germany).
| You could, too.
| google234123 wrote:
| I wonder how pensions will work when there is 1 worker
| for every 2-3 retirees (maybe 1 personal on Social
| welfare too)
| scarface_74 wrote:
| A true "pension" should invest enough money in the
| present where the future value is enough to suppport
| today's workers when they retire.
|
| Modern government pensions are Ponzi schemes.
| nkohari wrote:
| This is literally how all commerce works, though. If
| someone opens a restaurant, for example, it's a bet that
| there's a market for the food they're preparing, and that
| their staff will be capable of being able to meet the
| demand. Sometimes you're right, and sometimes you're
| wrong.
| echelon wrote:
| > because they would place another bet on something else to
| remain competitive.
|
| Now might not be the best bet making time. Circumstances
| and the market change.
|
| Revolving loans might cost more to service, which also
| impacts R&D and product expenditures. It's very dynamic.
|
| > To cut so heavily looks like they've no great idea on the
| next bet that they could make, that they don't believe
| those people they hired could contribute towards another
| thing in the near future (or they have no runway to explore
| doing so).
|
| Exactly this. And that's just reality. No company has
| perfect information.
|
| > Companies should place bets to stay relevant and grow,
| this looks like there isn't a big bet now.
|
| AI clearly is looking interesting and shaping up in a big
| way for music, but the iron probably isn't hot enough to
| strike yet.
|
| These are hard problems that leadership constantly grapples
| with.
| buro9 wrote:
| > Now might not be the best bet making time.
| Circumstances and the market change.
|
| This is true, but I personally believe that the loss of
| knowledge and experience from within is a significant
| drag on momentum for when you do want to hire again...
| these people likely won't return even if the markets
| change, they've been burned, why would they return.
|
| If it's possible to place the next bet, retain as much
| knowledge and experience as possible, and leverage that
| towards something new, then surely that is the best thing
| to do.
|
| Could there have been other bets? Probably, if audio is
| the definition of the market and what you have at the
| moment is predominantly Western music, then stronger
| pushes into native apps for different markets? A
| classical specific app / flavour? A jazz specific app /
| flavour? Podcasts are good, but I think audiobooks are
| better... the audiobook market does not feel "done" at
| all, there's a lot more that could be done here too.
| Generational AI dynamic music could be a thing too, not
| streaming a file but streaming the basis of a constantly
| generated infinite thing, i.e. study aids, sleep aids,
| etc. Or how about audio app sync with video devices to
| enable the audio from your film to come out of your smart
| speakers or Hi-Fi even without a 5.1 amp?
|
| A lot of these are smaller bets than "podcasts will be
| worth a gazillion dollars", but each is still
| significant, sticky, and leads to higher retention, and
| fights against the commoditization of music playback and
| the low margins there.
|
| 17% cuts does signal a lack of ambition despite "economic
| headwinds", it feels like a "we need to cut deep" rather
| than a "what are all the new bets we can make and then we
| are compelled to cut the difference".
| heyjamesknight wrote:
| This is what happens during periods of economic
| uncertainty. It's like counting cards with a freshly
| shuffled deck: nobody can tell what the state of the game
| is, so you place a minimum bet until you can get a feel for
| things again.
|
| The movie is meh, but the boardroom scene in Margin Call
| has a great line:
|
| "I'm here for one reason and one reason alone. I'm here to
| guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from
| now. That's it. Nothing more. And standing here tonight,
| I'm afraid that I don't hear - a - thing. Just... silence."
|
| Consumer confidence is down three straight quarters in a
| row. Nobody feels good about what the music is going to do
| next.
| redleggedfrog wrote:
| They should feel good, because their capitalist machine
| has done just what it has aspired to do - get people to
| spend money they don't have:
|
| https://apnews.com/article/spending-consumers-inflation-
| econ...
|
| That's peak capitalism right there - you've got people
| spending to buy products with money borrowed from credit
| card companies and banks, which they will have difficulty
| paying off and will pay a good amount of interest on.
|
| If you can't make a company work in that environment, you
| might want to do a bit of a self examination and notice
| that your advertising is annoying and off-putting and
| your web-browser based client is utter shit.
| buro9 wrote:
| > Consumer confidence is down three straight quarters in
| a row. Nobody feels good about what the music is going to
| do next.
|
| Sure, but you can leave a downturn four ways:
|
| 1. You went out of business
|
| 2. You experienced a decline and let a lot of people go
|
| 3. You managed to stay roughly where you were, no further
| forward, no further backwards (this is a small success
| but still a great achievement) and you may have let some
| people go -- the expression "running to stand still"
| applies here
|
| 4. You find a way to come out better than you went in and
| maybe continued to hire
|
| Spotify feel like they've gone from #3 to #2, but they
| had ambitions to be #4 of those scenarios, they will
| likely survive, but in what form and with what potential?
| And more to the point, if their competitors manage to
| achieve #3 or #4, at what long-term cost to Spotify?
| ctvo wrote:
| I think trying to normalize a ~20% workforce reduction as
| business as usual is a little bit much here.
|
| Management made _a lot_ of mistakes to get to this situation.
| It wasn 't we tried a few things and it didn't work out, it
| was we burrowed too much money, spent too much money, and
| risked too much.
|
| What other tech company has cut this deeply recently? You
| name their competitors, like Amazon and Apple -- is it
| happening there? 20% is not 2-3%.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > You name their competitors, like Amazon and Apple -- is
| it happening there?
|
| Their competitors are not direct comparisons, though, and
| percentages can be a little misleading. Spotify is ~7.5k
| employees, and does one thing. Amazon is ~1.5m employees,
| and does many, many things.
| ctvo wrote:
| Amazon's layoffs are a percentage of _corporate_
| workforce, not their ~1.5 million warehouse + corporate
| pool.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Around end of 2022 and start of 2023, Amazon laid off 18k
| people from their corporate workforce - about 1.2% of
| their global employee count[0]. That seemed to be the
| figure the % above was from, as the % from their
| corporate workforce was 6%.
|
| [0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/05/am
| azon-to...
| lukeschlather wrote:
| I am honestly looking to move to a competitor _because_ of
| their podcasting and audiobook efforts. Well, and I don 't
| necessarily care about those things per se but Spotify used
| to be a focused music app, and they keep removing things from
| the app in favor of whatever new "growth thing" they want to
| do this year. I never know when I load up the app what is
| going to have changed and take me an extra 5 minutes to find
| what I want.
|
| They have done so much damage to their app's usability by
| trying to "grow" that someone could probably sell me on some
| ultra-premium subscription that actually had a good music
| player that functioned more like the music players of 15
| years ago.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| FWIW I switched to Apple Music and the player is pretty
| good, plus the music is lossless.
| explaininjs wrote:
| There's a lot about the Music app for Mac that makes me
| wonder how a trillion dollar company can produce such a
| crappy website (yes it's a webview, not native), and the
| iOS app is jittery and buggy in its own way, but in the
| end I do agree it's the best option around, and I've been
| a happy-ish paying customer for almost a decade now.
| (part of that time I had Spotify too)
| matwood wrote:
| Same. If you use the Apple ecosystem it works well. I
| switched long ago once Google started pushing GPM to YTM.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| You can avoid most of the annoyances by always using the
| Songs view and hitting Command-B to get the columns
| browser like iTunes. Then edit the columns to browse in
| the menu.
| explaininjs wrote:
| That's a neat trick! I just wish there was a Playlist
| option and Favorites. (The "Groupings" component is empty
| for me, not sure if that is supposed to have the
| playlists)
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| For playlists you can choose "view as songs" in one of
| the menus and then enable the column browser. I have a
| smart playlist for the classical genres that I do this
| for.
|
| The groupings is a tag that's free-form text: one nice
| thing about Apple Music is you can edit the tags, even if
| you don't buy the music. I typically split "Classical"
| into "Baroque"/"Classical"/"Romantic" and then rewrite
| "composer" to be "last name, first name (years of life)"
| rez9x wrote:
| I recently left Spotify for Apple Music, in large part
| because of this new development path. I don't want podcasts,
| audiobooks, etc mixed in with my music. I prefer separate
| apps.
|
| I think what bothered me more was the focus on branching into
| these new paths without any innovation in the music
| department--I'm sure there was innovation that wasn't visible
| to me. I'm tired of the same black and green color scheme. I
| don't like that I don't have a 'Library' and everything just
| goes in liked or a playlist.
|
| I think their expansion into other media was a signal to me
| to look for someone doing a better job at specializing.
| explaininjs wrote:
| Congrats! Now you get to experience the glory of the deque.
| Your days of being restricted to stack pushing are in the
| past.
| rez9x wrote:
| That (deque) is actually one of my favorite features, and
| something that had tempted me in the past. I have to
| relearn some behavior on queue creation though. I'm use
| to just clicking play, rather than adding to queue, so I
| end up with a bunch of songs in queue that I didn't
| intend (because I played a song from a longer playlist to
| start).
| explaininjs wrote:
| There's definitely some annoyances... the paramount one
| for me is actually the opposite of what you describe: I
| click on an item to simply play it and it makes me deal
| with a pop up asking me how it should interact with my
| queue, even when I have no queue at all! Just play the
| damned song, stop asking me questions.
|
| Ugh... things like this make me wish we had just one FOSS
| music player with a paid backend. I'd comment out all the
| modals and get on with life.
| dingnuts wrote:
| Nothing is stopping you from donating to Navidrome
| development
| explaininjs wrote:
| As I understand it that is for listening to a library of
| personally owned material remotely? That's not really
| what I'm looking for. I appreciate the MAAS model, it's
| just the UI's that suck.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Lots and lots of FOSS music players use libspotify or can
| otherwise connect to your Spotify account.
|
| Here's just one. It's BYO frontend. Last I knew, there
| were a bunch of them. https://mopidy.com/
|
| Also look into mpd, the music playing daemon.
| explaininjs wrote:
| That's a good attempt, but I'd rather not run a server -
| if I'm paying for the service I'd like to have an API I
| can run/write a frontend against. And ideally I'd have
| the ability to listen to lossless music, not whatever
| encoding Spotify thinks I deserve.
| thefourthchime wrote:
| Same here, plus the constant house ads. It seemed like
| every time i opened the App I had to close some banner ad
| for a new feature/record/whatever.
| r00fus wrote:
| Looking to do this - how did you migrate your playlists?
| Also my family was using my main Apple Music account - so I
| have to "clear out the new place" as I setup a family
| account for them.
| alienreborn wrote:
| I have migrated services couple of times and used Soundiz
| and Songshift. They miss few matches but overall gets the
| job done.
| atommclain wrote:
| Not OP, but I used SongShift for iOS. Worked great.
| rez9x wrote:
| I used Soundshift. You can pay ~$7 to have unlimited
| exporting or do playlists 200 at a time for free.
| wayfinder wrote:
| Umm, what? There's been plenty of innovation...
|
| The new cover videos bands can post on songs are ill. The
| changing of the like button to not be just for liked songs
| is great (usually, tho sometimes I wish it was two separate
| buttons). There's constantly a bunch of new tools to find
| new music, some hitting better than others. The "listen
| with friends," while still buggy asf, is a great feature.
|
| 5 years ago, Spotify updates were more like "we changed the
| colors and layout of the UI and that's about it."
|
| It's true though. They haven't reinvented music completely.
| rez9x wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're referring to with the Like/Love
| button. It seems to be the same as it ever was for me,
| except the UI is different based on whether you're in
| CarPlay, mobile app, or desktop app, so sometimes it's a
| heart and sometimes it's a plus sign.
|
| One of my biggest complaints for Spotify is the removal
| of star ratings, but that's been probably a decade ago at
| this point. Apple Music has it for the desktop app, but
| it's missing from mobile.
| Log_out_ wrote:
| What I found thoroughly missing in all music streaming was
| emotional composition, aka the Algo being able to play
| music tailored to what situations I I'm experiencing and
| giving it an arc.
|
| Example:im programming and the concentration music goes
| towards a victorious crescendo once it works.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Part of my dev process at work involves running a
| (rather) flaky test suite on my laptop. The test suite
| takes several minutes to run, and it doesn't fail fast.
| No good for my short attention span.
|
| I wrote a script which runs the test suite in a loop.
| When the tests fail, it plays horns.aiff (from The Price
| is Right). When the tests pass it plays the epic
| Champions League theme music.
|
| The best part is, I can do other stuff while waiting for
| the flaky tests to pass, without having to remember to
| check the terminal they're running in. Audio cues are
| really great.
| gentleman11 wrote:
| I left spotify after reading their privacy policy and some
| news stories about how they plan to use your listening data
| to infer things about you and sell the results
| FalconSensei wrote:
| > I don't like that I don't have a 'Library' and everything
| just goes in liked or a playlist.
|
| I left Spotify a while ago, but one thing I hate is that
| there's no way of differentiating when you add complete
| albums to your collection vs only one song.
| saadullahsaeed wrote:
| This is precisely why I also switched to Apple Music, it
| was annoying to have Spotify constantly pushing podcast
| content to me as someone who had no interest in Podcasts
| and no way to enable a "music only" mode either.
| ntlk wrote:
| I switched to Apple Music for exactly the same reason.
| criddell wrote:
| I too recently left Spotify for Apple Music because it
| works better on my Home Pod and Apple TV. I don't know why
| Spotify doesn't fix this. I know they are in a feud with
| Apple and maybe they think this is a way to apply pressure
| to Apple, but the risk is they lose people like me.
|
| There were other reasons for leaving. I don't like that I
| can't hide or disable audiobooks or podcasts. They take up
| a lot of important screen space and are useless to me. I
| also really dislike the notifications from Spotify. I have
| them all turned off, but ever once in a while they decide
| to show one anyway.
| hasmolo wrote:
| frequently apple has non official api they use for
| inhouse apps that provide better interfacing with
| hardware
| dkarl wrote:
| Counter-anecdote, I like that Spotify hasn't changed, and
| if it changed significantly tomorrow, it might prompt me to
| look at competitors and decide afresh which music service
| to use.
| corndoge wrote:
| Buying music, downloading it and putting it into your music
| folder also works great! Then you can organize it, display
| it, order it and listen to it however you want by using a
| player that suits your preferences, decoupling the source
| of your music from the application you use to play it.
| oe wrote:
| That's me too. I disliked having podcasts in otherwise
| perfectly OK music app, and also Spotify's efforts to
| rebrand 'podcasts' as something else than "mp3s on RSS".
| But I was a paying customer for 10+ years so they had a
| good run.
| Kaytaro wrote:
| It's also healthy to get backlash from the public and
| investors for layoffs. Personally I don't think it's ever
| right to layoff employees for leaderships mistakes. It should
| be used as a last resort only when the entire company is at
| risk of going under. Based on their post it doesn't sound
| like that's the case, they even bragged about a "positive
| earnings report".
| dbbk wrote:
| You're half right. The podcasting and audiobook areas already
| had layoffs before. This is now layoffs across all areas of
| the business.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| > Honestly, what do you expect Spotify to do?
|
| The people who made the decision could bear the brunt of the
| failed "bet". But I'm willing to wager that the CEO's year-
| end bonus isn't going to change radically in light of this.
| enlightenedfool wrote:
| So, can at least the execs that made the wrong bets be fired?
| Those are multi million dollar mistakes. But nope... they
| just take "complete responsibility" and fire the dev teams.
| baggachipz wrote:
| > Honestly, what do you expect Spotify to do?
|
| Not spend a fortune on Joe Rogan and then lay off people.
| m4jor wrote:
| One could argue that Joe Rogan brought in a lot of new
| users and thus profits.
|
| The employees being fired worked on a failed ideas and were
| just a lot of expenses.
| baggachipz wrote:
| > The employees being fired worked on a failed ideas and
| were just a lot of expenses.
|
| $200 million worth?
| jLaForest wrote:
| >This is just how normal, healthy business goes
|
| 17% layoffs is healthy? No thanks
| dangus wrote:
| I think that people get really upset about layoffs like
| they're an example of poor planning, but in reality it's all
| a calculated risk.
|
| Laying off employees isn't a very negative thing from the
| perspective of the corporation. Very few costs are associated
| with laying off employees. A few months of salary, but that's
| it. It's an at-will arrangement.
|
| I learned in a business class that, mathematically, most
| companies acutally take too _few_ risks. It 's not hard to
| understand why when you start doing some the math: if you
| invest $1 million into 10 projects 9/10 of those projects
| fail but the one successful project makes $10 million, then
| your investment broke even. But our brains see a 90% failure
| rate and want to be more conservative with our investments.
| Let's say, alternatively, we invest in 5 projects to be more
| conservative with our money, but because we didn't take
| enough moonshots we never found a project that paid off, so
| now we lost $5 million instead of breaking even. This
| hypothetical thought experiment is why many companies should
| be over-hiring and taking risks.
|
| If you make a mistake, so what? You lay off the workers and
| you immediately stop paying for that cost, and you might even
| have something to show for taking the risk.
|
| Also, yes, it takes more people to build something than to
| maintain it. Employees don't like to hear it, but hiring
| employees that you deliberately plan to lay off in a few
| years is a completely valid strategy.
|
| If we want this to change then we need to have our
| governments have better layoff protections in place, like
| mandatory severance or notice periods. The WARN Act does this
| but only for large employers making large cuts.
| matwood wrote:
| > If we want this to change then we need to have our
| governments have better layoff protections in place, like
| mandatory severance or notice periods.
|
| But then you push companies in the exact opposite direction
| than you say you want them to go. If it's harder to do
| layoffs, companies will take less risks that require
| hiring.
| dangus wrote:
| You're right, but remember that I was speaking from the
| corporations' perspective. They can make more money by
| taking more risks, but at some point larger society has
| to weigh corporate profitability against societal well-
| being.
|
| For example, a factory could make more money if it dumped
| its pollutants into a river rather than paying extra to
| dispose them properly. That difference in incentives
| between greater society versus the individual business is
| why we have the EPA.
|
| Basically, the intention of my last comment was to answer
| the common question that might be asked of: "Wow, this
| company laid off so many people, what were they thinking?
| Maybe they should plan ahead next time?" And the answer
| to that is usually "yes they planned for this scenario
| and they're perfectly okay with having a layoff."
| nostrademons wrote:
| Is it though?
|
| There's always a business justification for hiring, simply
| because there has to be to get the headcount approved. That
| doesn't mean that it's the actual _reason_ , as in the
| deciding factor that gets the decider to say "yes, we're
| going to hire more people". Principle agent problems are a
| thing. You can always come up with reasons that are true but
| wouldn't by themselves change your decision. And conversely,
| you can figure out what someone's _actual_ reasons are by
| looking at counterfactuals where those conditions didn 't
| occur and the person (or a peer) made a different decision.
|
| Between 2020 and 2023, Google went from 118k employees to
| 190k. Meta went from 58,604 to 86,482. Stripe went from ~2000
| to ~7000. Coinbase went from 1200 to 4500. These companies
| are not competing significantly in podcasting and audiobook
| efforts. But what they do have in common is that they are
| growth tech companies whose business models are pretty
| sensitive to interest rates and availabilty of capital. Who
| _didn 't_ hire in 2021-2022? Mostly industries like
| restaurants and hospitality that are _not_ particularly
| interest rate sensitive, and were still recovering from
| COVID. They 're catching up now that people are spending
| more.
|
| That makes me strongly suspect that directors hire simply
| because there are funds available, and there are funds
| available because rates are low. Indeed, this is the Fed's
| lever on the unemployment rate. If they _didn 't_, then
| changing the money supply wouldn't have any effect on
| unemployment or wage inflation, which would be purely
| determined by shifts in consumer demand.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| If Spotify had a brain in their head they would've known that
| Amazon's offering was desperation against losing so badly to
| the main big baddie, not a genuinely good product. The Amazon
| music player is a joke and the service sucks at integrating
| with other services and products.
| bogomipz wrote:
| >They didn't hire "for the sake of hiring" -- they hired
| specifically to build up their podcasting and audiobook
| efforts, which were totally new products within the app.
| Which they thought were essential to staying competitive --
| e.g. what if people start moving over to Amazon instead with
| its Music+Wondery+Audible, or other competitors?
|
| If this were true then wouldn't the cuts be limited to the
| podcasting and audiobook arms of the company i.e. the source
| of the overstaffing? The announcement however states the cuts
| are across the entire company - "To align Spotify with our
| future goals and ensure we are right-sized for the challenges
| ahead, I have made the difficult decision to reduce our total
| headcount by approximately 17% across the company."
| robin_reala wrote:
| Maybe it's just me, but as a CEO if you misjudge enough to
| have to fire a double-digit percentage of your staff
| shouldn't you face some consequences, like demotion or losing
| your job yourself? Daniel only owns 7.5% so it's not like
| he's a majority that can push anything through.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Since when does the ruling class of C levels and board
| members feel ANY pain?
|
| Any apologism for the "Idea men" and "Decision makers" is
| absurd until they start feeling the pain from THEIR bad
| ideas and poor decisions.
|
| They will make a shitty zoom recording saying "I take full
| responsibility for cutting 20% of our yearly payroll" while
| signing off on their own bonus.
|
| Wish I got to sign off on my own bonus!
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The members of the board sign off on executive
| compensation. And shareholders vote for board members.
| pmelendez wrote:
| >Honestly, what do you expect Spotify to do? Not try to stay
| competitive
|
| That's a reductionist way of looking at it, but an
| alternative way would have been what Daniel said on that
| letter; They were "more productive and less efficient and
| they needed to be both".
|
| From my ivory tower I do see some things that could have been
| done differently, such as adding only one new offering (maybe
| just podcasting), or rely more in contractors than employees
| and set the temporary expectation of the roles up front.
| parineum wrote:
| > They didn't hire "for the sake of hiring" -- they hired
| specifically to build up their podcasting and audiobook
| efforts, which were totally new products within the app.
| Which they thought were essential to staying competitive
|
| How many employees does it take to take an app that already
| works great on playing audio files and do a bit of UI
| redesign and change those audio files from music to podcasts
| and books? It's not like they're building this thing from the
| ground up.
|
| The podcast app I use was built by one person, granted over a
| few years, and it works way better as a podcast app than
| spotify does. They are going to layoff 1,500 people. I assume
| those aren't all engineers but I think a team of 10,
| (including devops and QA) could build each of these features
| in the timeframe they did plus the additional business side
| of the ventures (negotiating contracts, acquiring rights,
| etc.).
|
| What were the other 1450 people doing?
| jmarchello wrote:
| I'm not saying businesses shouldn't make bets or innovate,
| but in my experience hiring more people to do those things
| has a point of diminishing returns, and that point is much
| lower than most people think. From what I've experienced,
| more people tend to slow innovation, not accelerate it.
|
| And while Spotify may not have hired for the sake of hiring,
| my comment was more targeted to the general behavior of tech
| startups during the ZIRP years, where I've personally
| experienced companies just hiring to show they they're
| growing, even when they have very little work for those extra
| personnel to do. It's not often intentional, but is rather
| the result of poor discipline or lack of forethought.
| geodel wrote:
| > "We hired for the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we
| wanted to signal 'growth'...
|
| But that's the whole point of modern day life. Any benefit we
| have gotten we never looked critically what was the cost. It is
| only at discomfort and disruption we gain this great self-
| awareness of the world.
|
| They did disservice in same sense if we consider giving job in
| people is some service to employees.
| sparrowInHand wrote:
| ? If you are hired by a architect and a company is downsizing,
| its actually a recommendation. Your software works- it needs
| less people for maintenance then for growth. And at a company
| thats stagnating and going into survival mode- your skills will
| not be needed except for the last ditch pivots (which will be a
| architectural mess). Once more from the the top - to be let go
| in a software role from such a company, is a recommendation.
| hammock wrote:
| >Anytime I see layoffs like this, All I hear is "We hired for
| the sake of hiring when money was cheap and we wanted to signal
| 'growth', But now reality has set in and we need our employees
| to serve a purpose beyond simply headcount".... In my opinion
| they did these employees a disservice by hiring them in the
| first place. We need our companies to act more responsibly
| regardless of the price of capital. Innovate sure, but don't
| fill up your tank when gas is cheap just to do doughnuts in the
| parking lot.
|
| I struggle to understand comments like this one. Spotify were
| being responsible at the time. Their employees are not 30-year
| mortgages, they are volunteer employees given no promise of
| continued employment.
|
| Through a few degrees of separation it all boils down to "we
| could do X when prime interest rates were 3%, and now they are
| 8% we can only afford Y"
| notpachet wrote:
| > They were being responsible at the time.
|
| Another strong contender for humanity's future epitaph.
| hammock wrote:
| Remember hindsight is 20/20. If capitalists were as risk-
| averse as some would like, we'd be stuck in the past
| forever
| morelisp wrote:
| > we'd be stuck in the past forever
|
| You say this like it's self-evident it's a bad thing, but
| it's not, even if I'm a middle-class white guy in 1975,
| let alone an Oneida in 1475.
| notpachet wrote:
| I get annoyed with comments like yours that reach for
| absolutisms to try and make a point. No, we wouldn't be
| stuck in the past "forever". We may just move more slowly
| into the future than you would prefer.
|
| Given our historic inability to predict the long-term
| externalities of present-day technologies, I'd say a more
| cautious approach is warranted compared to the current
| YOLO strategy.
|
| The only way the human race becomes stuck in the past
| forever is if it goes extinct.
| paulddraper wrote:
| > don't fill up your task when gas is cheap
|
| Of course you should!
|
| > do doughnuts in the parking lot
|
| Of course you shouldn't!
|
| Did Spotify do that?
| rPlayer6554 wrote:
| You can't have your cake and eat it too. There are plenty of
| other lower risk companies that have way lower chances of
| layoffs, but they don't pay as well. Working at a company that
| tasks risks and has a high rate of return also has a higher
| chance of making the wrong bet and needing to cut you. If you
| want a perfectly stable job go work in the government: you'll
| be practically unfirable.
|
| - someone who was layed off from a FAANG corp. I was not done a
| disservice, I knew what I was getting into.
| ghaff wrote:
| Or the public sector. Anyone who thought a money-losing
| company like Spotify was a safe ship to jump on board didn't
| think things through.
| culopatin wrote:
| On the other hand, 17% of headcount had a job during that time.
| Which one is better?
| smugglerFlynn wrote:
| Why, though? Investors are paying for doughnuts and smoke, and
| many tech companies are really in the drift racing business,
| not in "commute rationally" business.
|
| The reality is, current economy has much less demand for this
| kind of a road show, but all their hiring was totally rational.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I keep reading this.
|
| I don't know how much Spotify pays or if it pays above market.
| But I much rather have a high paying job - especially if it
| doesn't require relocation and then get laid off than not have
| a high paying role at all.
|
| A job is not a marriage, it's more like a a semi serious dating
| relationship. I've had 9 jobs in 27 years and 7 since 2008.
|
| A job is merely a method to exchange labor for money to support
| my addiction to food and shelter.
|
| Once either me or the company decide it isn't on our best
| interest to continue the transactional relationship, we break
| up and I change my relationship status to "open for work" and
| put myself back out there.
|
| Amazon was my 8th job. I knew from reputation and 2nd hand
| experience, that eventually Amazon was going to Amazon.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38474212
|
| And I planned accordingly from day 1.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37969302
| fragmede wrote:
| Nine serious relationships in 27 years, but no marriage? I
| bet you live in one of those heathen countries where sex
| before marriage is legal, don't you? If you weren't allowed
| to have sex before marriage, would you still be unmarried
| after 27 years of relationships? Sweden, where Spotify is
| headquartered, is 8,600 kilometers from the San Francisco VC-
| backed tech scene, and is just as culturally removed from it
| as well.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| That's the first time I've heard my analogy to job -
| relationships being taken to its logical extreme.
| lr4444lr wrote:
| Hot take: it's a life skill to look at a company beyond the
| salary they offer you and get at least a basic sense of whether
| they are over staffed, well managed, offering a valuable
| service, and not in a dying industry - or at least be sure your
| role there is doing something high value to the critical
| service provided. Too many employees IME are just too
| comfortable with ignorance about their employer outside of
| their team and the other teams they work with directly.
| maxehmookau wrote:
| I still cannot fathom any board allowing the CEO at the helm of a
| public that made cuts of 17% to remain in place.
|
| That's a huge pivot in organisational structure by any measure
| and shows clearly poor judgement.
| bsnnkv wrote:
| 17%? Hah, I just got hit by layoffs at my last employer that
| targeted 25% of the workforce. Guess what happened to the
| CEO...
|
| That's right. Nothing.
| ketchupdebugger wrote:
| I wonder if they laid off 17% of management and leadership as
| well. probably not, but they should
| senda wrote:
| weren't they paying data scientists 500k?
| josefresco wrote:
| I consider Spotify like Hulu - existing as a puppet to give "the
| industry" a centralized distribution service. I don't ever expect
| them to make a profit, unless they decide to pivot and sell
| what's left to another corp. Am I wrong?
| Tao3300 wrote:
| I think you're kind of right. The thing about Spotify is that
| my initial reaction was "it's about damn time". It's not like
| it was technical innovative. Everything needed to make it had
| been around for at least a decade, they just had to get all the
| legal stuff figured out first.
| umeshunni wrote:
| It's not a puppet - they are officially part owned (3-4%) by
| the Universal Music Group. Sony Music Group and Warner Music
| Group have sold some and all of their shares in Spotify,
| respectively
| emodendroket wrote:
| Has Spotify ever made money? It seems strange that all these
| music streaming services have limped along for years without
| having a model that makes any money or sense. Convenient for the
| rest of us I suppose.
| Czarcasm wrote:
| They have an operating profit, but they choose to reinvest it
| all back into the company, thus they don't have an overall
| profit. They could reduce the amount they are reinvesting into
| the company at any time in order to produce an overall profit.
|
| This is exactly what Amazon did/does. Doesn't mean that they
| have "limped along"
| emodendroket wrote:
| Do they? This would seem to suggest otherwise.
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1022122/spotify-
| operatin...
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| It's complicated. A lot of money exited from Spotify after its
| IPO. The rightsholders (Warner, UMG...) got an outsized return
| on that investment. Smooth it out since then and it looks like
| a more routine profit. I'm not sure if basic financials are an
| adequate format for a backcatalogue monetization business.
| moogly wrote:
| Daniel Ek and Drake certainly have made money.
|
| Smaller artists? Not a chance. They get paid in exposure, which
| is the #1 rule not to do in the creative arts.
| emodendroket wrote:
| I'm not even talking about artists though. Just Spotify the
| corporate entity.
| moogly wrote:
| Indeed. Personally I think it's somewhat perverse how a
| huge machine operating at a loss can redistribute so much
| wealth though, to the top, no less. That was sort of my
| point.
|
| Like, I could have an easier time accepting Spotify losing
| money if it actually enriched the masses that produce the
| majority of its content, but we all know that's not what it
| is doing.
| saos wrote:
| That's much
| Solvency wrote:
| Spotify spends millions per month on lavish "creative" team
| salaries in NYC who do nothing but create gradient playlist
| covers and other low grade "design" work that is 100%
| unnecessary. All while they redesign and destroy their UX and
| product experiences every iteration. All of that money could go
| straight to the artists.
| honeybadger1 wrote:
| From a company that projects far too much, not surprising.
| charles_f wrote:
| > To understand this decision, I think it is important to assess
| Spotify with a clear, objective lens
|
| ... then proceeds to vague MBA word without a single number to
| support them.
|
| > We debated making smaller reductions throughout 2024 and 2025
|
| What was not debated was keeping people they hired.
|
| > we still have too many people dedicated to supporting work and
| even doing work around the work rather than contributing to
| opportunities with real impact
|
| We're left to guess what this means. What's work around the work?
| If that work is now unsavory, why can't they work on work rather
| than around it? Is this describing reducing the management layer?
| (support) or customer/partner support? Will they be replaced by
| automation? I get you don't want to go into specifics of who's
| let go, but then don't pretend you're providing a clear analysis,
| and don't give a washed out business lingo salad instead.
|
| TBH I don't see what changed on Spotify for a customer
| perspective in the past few years. I still see bugs I reported
| years ago, the UI is largely the same. Not that I'm complaining,
| I just care about the music. But that leads me to think either
| the dev team is producing stuff that's on the fringe and
| optional, being quite inefficient, or mainly working on
| maintenance, and the bulk of the opex is going elsewhere.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| Frankly I think the UI has gotten consistently worse. Playing
| saved/liked (Spotify keeps changing the word) songs from a
| specific artist is still very hard and convoluted. "Now
| Playing" pop-up panel on desktop was a feature no one asked
| for. "Your Library" revamp was confusing and solely for the
| purpose to push podcasts which somehow made it harder to view
| the podcasts I actually follow. Then comes the dreadful rounded
| corners on everything but also weird empty spaces around the UI
| resulting in wasted screen real estate. I held onto Google Play
| Music until its very last moment, all because of Spotify's
| dreadful UI.
| cragfar wrote:
| > We're left to guess what this means. What's work around the
| work? If that work is now unsavory, why can't they work on work
| rather than around it? Is this describing reducing the
| management layer? (support) or customer/partner support? Will
| they be replaced by automation? I get you don't want to go into
| specifics of who's let go, but then don't pretend you're
| providing a clear analysis, and don't give a washed out
| business lingo salad instead.
|
| > TBH I don't see what changed on Spotify for a customer
| perspective in the past few years. I still see bugs I reported
| years ago, the UI is largely the same.
|
| He didn't get into it because you answered it yourself. And
| anyone who has used it for a while has most likely the same
| initial thought.
| mrsilencedogood wrote:
| This reads to me like "the darn developers are spending too
| much time not laser-focused on business impact and keep
| bikeshedding and doing make-work!"
|
| It's impossible to tell if this is what's happening though. It
| can really go either way.
|
| I've seen orgs where the perf-review meat grinder is driven so
| tight that engineers are essentially punished/PIPd for doing
| things that NEED to happen even if they aren't sexy business
| impact. Like upgrading library versions (not all of them, just
| the core/most important ones!) so you don't wake up one day and
| realize you're on a 6 year old version of a core
| library/framework. Even remediating incidents was treated as
| "not impactful work". This resulted in the expected shitstorm
| and teams were literally churning employees because oncall was
| so bad and just doing anything was so awful, and it took a
| staff engineer's guile just to get an otherwise-relatively-
| simple project over the line because you had to be a ninja just
| to navigate the awful existing mess of 10 years' worth of
| laser-focus on business impact.
|
| And I've seen orgs where the engineers run rampant, doing
| random side-quests constantly, junior engineers run amok over-
| architecting every project with all of the skills their CS
| degrees gave them, senior engineers make magnum opuses of
| medium-sized projects, and principal engineers pontificate and
| aid and abet any and all architecture-astronauting that anyone
| else in the org does. And naturally none of it was done in any
| way shape or form in coordination with product.
|
| And naturally there's everything in between. So whether they
| have a healthy amount of focus on non-sexy work and wish they
| were neglecting it more to reap shorter-term product-focused
| gains, or they have too much bikeshedding and they want to be
| more product-focused, it is difficult to say.
|
| (Naturally the cynic in me says it is probably the former,
| though...)
| charles_f wrote:
| > laser-focused on business impact
|
| If you only knew the PTSD that the expression "laser-focused"
| is triggering. From an organization that had 12 focuses per
| quarter, and as many "core-priorities".
| jzackpete wrote:
| I hope they fired the person who came up with "smart shuffle" and
| thought tying the shuffle button to a successful network call was
| a good idea
| Tao3300 wrote:
| So far the only playlist I'm using smart shuffle with is my
| Christmas one. I put in a bunch of the weird shit I want to
| hear, and it injects some mainstream stuff to keep the wife and
| kids happy. So it's doing a bad job matching my tastes, but I'm
| exploiting that as a feature.
| okrad wrote:
| The successful network call condition is particularly
| frustrating. However, I enjoy the feature on the whole.
| kenhwang wrote:
| Seriously such a buggy and undesirable feature. Smart shuffle
| replaced the default shuffle for me on all interfaces that
| didn't get updated to switch between the two shuffles, so on
| Android Auto, the only shuffle option was smart shuffle and I
| had to use my phone to switch to dumb shuffle.
|
| Then it isn't even really smart or a shuffle. It just inserts
| the same 3 songs, in every playlist regardless of how well it
| would fit.
| ugiox wrote:
| Now everyone sees just layoffs again. But there are so many
| companies thriving and keeping their workforce. As they are in
| balance. And are also happy to grow at a smaller pace.
| crorella wrote:
| This is so important, growing at a small and healthier pace.
|
| Some companies try to make the reason of their existence to
| grow as fast as possible, no matter what.... and in the process
| they destroy the value they originally offered to its
| customers, processes, people and quality controls.. for what?
|
| There was a class from Darden School that talked about that, I
| recommend reading this summary from it
| https://iveybusinessjournal.com/publication/growth-to-greatn...
| sitkack wrote:
| So effectively contractors. Companies shouldn't be allowed to
| "shed" this much of their workforce in a system like the US's
| here we have a very poor safety net.
|
| They bulked up, built their products and now want to slim down
| and enjoy their profits at the expense of these sacrificial
| workers.
| mrkeen wrote:
| Sidestepping the issue of the US's labour laws, I almost feel
| like _this is what a healthy software industry should look
| like_.
|
| You go in, you build, and when the job is done, you leave.
|
| We just haven't figured out how to get the job done yet.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| If only employers are capable of communicating that expection
| to prospective employes in an honest manner instead of doing
| the whole "we are a family" gaslighting act.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| If any tech worker is more than two years out of school and
| is naive enough to believe that and are not always prepared
| to change jobs, I have no sympathy for them
| matchbok wrote:
| One alternative is never hiring them in the first place, which
| is a real possibility if some bad ideas like yours were put
| into law.
| carstenhag wrote:
| Realistically they would have a permanent contract at a
| company that contracts out developers.
|
| Flexibility (at the cost of a premium) for the client
| company, safe for the employee.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Businesses should be more responsible in hiring not just for
| the good of the workers but for the company as well. Hiring
| 17% more than you should've means there was a ton of waste.
| Rather than seeing this as a sign of prudence like most
| investors might, I see this as a reflection of poor planning.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| But "poor planning" is inevitable in business. It cannot be
| completely avoided or accounted for. What should a business
| do that has planned poorly if it needs to cut costs?
| matchbok wrote:
| Literally no business works likes this. Every team and hire
| is a risk, and the market understands this. You don't have
| the information to say if there was "waste" and even if
| there was, so what?
| scarface_74 wrote:
| Your safety net is spend less than you make which should be
| easy for tech workers who even for your CRUD developers can
| easily make twice the median _household_ wage.
| bdcravens wrote:
| > at the expense of these sacrificial workers
|
| Were they not paid during their employment? Not to mention
| everything they are doing for those exiting employees (average
| five months of severance including healthcare, 2 months of
| career placement services, etc)
| blindriver wrote:
| This was a good layoff note. He didn't say anything gag-worthy
| like "I take full responsibility for this."
|
| Most SaaS companies got a huge pandemic bump and overhired in
| 2021 and 2022. I think many if not most that haven't cut 20% will
| be cutting 20% or more in 2024.
| whateverman23 wrote:
| You can't fully remove the "gag-worthy" label unless they use
| the word "layoff". Calling it "rightsizing" or "headcount
| reduction" is gag-worthy.
|
| A great gag-worthy line: "Please know we are focused on
| treating our impacted colleagues with the respect and
| compassion they deserve".
|
| Also, if the note doesn't include the CEO stepping down (even
| with a transition period would be fine), then it's not a good
| layoff note.
| withinboredom wrote:
| I'm going to say it, this is why we need unions. Only a union can
| tell them "no, you're not. Maybe 5%." And then negotiate
| something. The only saving grace here is the generous severance
| package.
| mrbonner wrote:
| I didn't know they have that many people (9000) to work for a
| single product. I've been a subscriber for more than 5 years and
| the app on the iPhone just gets worse everyday. Why?
|
| - daily updates is gone. This is where I can get a snapshot of
| all new releases from artists I love. I'm not sure if Release
| Calendar is the new one but I don't bother to check.
|
| - I listen to classical and the song title naming is just subpar.
| For example, "Well-tempered Clavier, Book 1, J.S Bach, Angela
| Hewitt, Prelude in C Major is too long to be in the title.
| Especially, the rat if the album is just a repeat alternate
| between prelude or fugue and the chord.
|
| - recently play list stopped syncing between my phone and my
| desktop app after 2022 for some reason. Is it a bug or they just
| stop doing this since it costs more to sync?
|
| I probably won't switch to a different stream service for now as
| there is not much differences for me to migrate.
| keehun wrote:
| If you primarily listen to classical music, Apple's new
| Classical Music app (part of its Music subscription) is
| *fantastic*.
| alejoar wrote:
| What's not fantastic is apple's lock down of their ecosystem.
| I'm not paying for some lacking android app by Apple.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The screenshots in the Play Store make it seem like the
| same app I see in iOS.
| crorella wrote:
| another nice option is Qobuz, the sound quality is good for
| the newer releases.
| raccoonDivider wrote:
| The UI was one step below Spotify or Apple the last time I
| tried it though.
| savanaly wrote:
| I was using Apple Classical happily for ~1 month, then it
| stopped working. It would load all the metadata and let me
| browse around but when trying to play a song it wouldn't
| progress.
|
| I restarted my phone, reinstalled the app, went through
| several iterations of iOS updating, the problem never went
| away. No other app, including Spotify, has this issue on my
| phone. After a month of paying for Apple Music without
| Classical working I shrugged and unsubscribed. Big loss for
| me, and for them, since I am exactly their target audience
| with Apple Classical.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| FYI, you can contact Apple technical support pretty easily.
| I have been able to talk to a real person quickly a few
| times over the years.
|
| https://support.apple.com/contact
| raccoonDivider wrote:
| Does any other brand have something similar to Apple's
| support? I was kinda surprised to see that you could get
| called back as easily as I did. Or that their stores
| could quickly fix e.g. a bricked bootloader. The
| Windows/Android devices I had before had nothing like
| that.
| waffletower wrote:
| I am quite steeped in the Apple ecosystem, but Apple's crude
| syncing behaviors and runaway AMPLibraryAgent
| bugs/invasiveness, has me quarantining Apple media software.
| Use of Spotify does not mangle my private music library.
| comprev wrote:
| Always nice to see Apple Music Classical mentioned on here. I
| was one of the lead engineers building things before the
| acquisition and to my knowledge they still use tooling I
| built around automation of audio ingestion. Streaming music
| was a fascinating industry to work in
| mrbonner wrote:
| Really? I didn't know Apple has a dedicated streaming app for
| classical now. Will check it out. Thanks
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| Not to mention them killing playlist radio functionality, which
| was a great way to have a custom Pandora-like experience whose
| seed you could control.
| saos wrote:
| > recently play list stopped syncing between my phone and my
| desktop app after 2022 for some reason. Is it a bug or they
| just stop doing this since it costs more to sync?
|
| I thought this was just me. Defo a bug.
| dbtc wrote:
| Check out Idagio for classical. No affiliation.
| jes5199 wrote:
| I think that beyond some relatively small number, engineering
| headcount functions as a demonstration of wealth - it doesn't
| actually make the product better, it doesn't make you ship
| faster (Brooks's law). but it makes you look big and important
| and justifies your market cap
| DotaFan wrote:
| > I didn't know they have that many people (9000) to work for a
| single product.
|
| I would presume it's many more products than just Spotify app.
| Lalabadie wrote:
| > I didn't know they have that many people (9000) to work for a
| single product.
|
| Having had a wee insight into how it worked at Rdio
| (obligatory: I miss Rdio!), one big chunk of the answer is they
| need a literal army of lawyers.
|
| A worldwide streaming music library is a hoard of licensing
| liabilities for every possible country, with deals that expire,
| renew and change hands daily on every possible mix of business
| days and holiday calendars.
|
| As for the design and development headcount, I guess they
| dispatch teams and tasks as efficiently as Meta with their
| thousands of acqui-hired product people.
| dandesim wrote:
| It's very much more than supporting 'one product'. Off the top
| of my head, regarding engineering, I can think of:
|
| 1. iOS App 2. Android App 3. Windows App 4. Microsoft App 5.
| Web App 6. Underlying API 7. Artist Portal/App 8. Advertising
| Portal/App 9. PlayStation App 10. Xbox App
|
| There are probably entire engineering teams for each micro-
| service in the overall product (personalization, playlists,
| player, etc.).
| pants2 wrote:
| They have Spotify apps on everything: Garmin watches, Roku
| TVs, the "Car Thing", Amazon Echo, Facebook Portal, Discord,
| Bixby...
|
| That's a lot of apps to maintain and keep up to date with the
| latest features.
| ntlk wrote:
| They used to have Soundtrap, which is a DAW in the browser
| and had two separate apps. They sold it back to the founders
| AFAIK.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| Every damned time this happens someone asks how it's possible
| they have so many employees when it's just an app... Spotify
| owns multiple large podcast studios, has sales people,
| negotiators, music industry people, lawyers, facility staff,
| lawyers, marketing, content curators. It is the business engine
| through which the vast majority of the world consumes music
| these days. You can quibble about if they have too many
| engineering employees, but at least get the real number first.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| This seems false, Whatsapp became 'the business engine
| through which the vast majority of the world' sends texts on
| the backs of 20ish employees.
|
| Even assuming delivering music, podcasts, royalty payments,
| negotiations with artists, etc..., takes 100x more headcount
| in total, that should still be only around 2000 employees.
|
| 9000 just means most are not being that productive.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| Obviously you can do it leaner, if they couldn't they
| wouldn't be firing people. My point is that you shouldn't
| be trying to estimate based on the technical side when most
| of the head count is negotiating with record companies and
| producing podcasts. In any case I personally wouldn't be so
| obsessed with every company running as lean as possible,
| great way to have 5 people make 10 billion dollars and
| everyone else just gets to pound sand. In a healthy society
| companies should run fat to keep people employed, engaged,
| trained up, ready to fill in as a replacement, and lots and
| lots of vacation time.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| > ...when most of the head count is negotiating with
| record companies and producing podcasts.
|
| Can you link the source?
| firecall wrote:
| It does sound extreme doesn't it!
|
| But I wonder if they have to replicate non-dev teams in
| multiple countries?
|
| I'd imagine they have to a seperate legal, promotional,
| marketing, sales and so on teams for each market.
|
| Replicating these business functions quickly adds up to
| thousands of people employed!
|
| As an English speaker I tend to think of music as being all
| in English, but each region has its own musical culture
| that would need addressing.
|
| France I believe mandates a certain amount of French
| speaking songs.
| araes wrote:
| Spotify's issues and costs are royalty payments. Of the
| EUR567 million increase in cost of revenue for the Nine
| months ended September 30, 2023, higher royalty costs were
| EUR534 million of that total. (~94%) [1] This delta is vs
| 7,159 total cost of revenue on 9,576 of revenue
| (EURmillions).[1, pg4] From looking at the rest of the
| report, most other cost of revenue contributors are minor (5
| here, 10 there).
|
| In the total category, R&D (1,257), S&M (1,101), G&A (430).
| R&D trending up, possibly plateauing, S&M, G&A trending down.
| [1, pg4] All relatively minor compared to 7,159. (<=1/6)
|
| [1] pg 36, Spotify 2023 Financial Report, "Spotify Technology
| S.A.", FORM 6-K, October, 2023 - https://s29.q4cdn.com/175625
| 835/files/doc_financials/2023/q3...
| firecall wrote:
| For me it's the forcing of Podcasts down my throat that I hate.
|
| No Spotify, I do not want to listen to Joe Rogan and other
| right wing podcasts.
|
| Just let me hide Podcasts already :-(
| some_furry wrote:
| Spotify without podcasts would be delightful
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > they have that many people (9000) ... just gets worse
| everyday
|
| As much as I hate to see layoffs from an empathization
| perspective, maybe this is the reason? Remember Brook's Law -
| adding manpower to a late project makes it later. Too many
| cooks spoil the broth and all that.
| guluarte wrote:
| I count not open the app on my phone because the timezone
| reported by my carries was not compatible
| softwaredoug wrote:
| The layoffs suck. But WHO was laid off? What depts?
|
| I think it's important data because the labor market needs to
| adjust its skills away from what's not in demand, to what's IN
| demand.
| deng wrote:
| Spotify is a completely mistery to me. I'm asking: What does
| Spotify really _have_? They don 't own the music. They don't own
| podcasts (OK, they may have some exclusives like Rogan). All they
| have is a license, a bit of software, and lots of users. How will
| they ever turn a profit? What's the end game here?
|
| I just switched my whole family from Spotify to Deezer and it was
| literally a matter of minutes. There are even services that move
| all your favorites/playlists over and it worked flawlessly.
| kwanbix wrote:
| Deezer is a completely mistery to me. I'm asking: What does
| Deezer really have? They don't own the music. They don't own
| podcasts (OK, they may have some exclusives). All they have is
| a license, a bit of software, and lots of users. How will they
| ever turn a profit? What's the end game here? I just switched
| my whole family from Deezer to tidal and it was literally a
| matter of minutes. There are even services that move all your
| favorites/playlists over and it worked flawlessly.
| deng wrote:
| Very witty. Yes, the same applies to Deezer. What I'm saying
| is: it's a race to the bottom, and in the end, musicians will
| suffer (they already do).
| kwanbix wrote:
| But I think the problem is the music companies. Spotify
| says they have given 40 billion (american) to the music
| companies.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| Spotify Connect is a real game changer. I tap a song on the web
| player and it streams it on our living room amp, which supports
| it natively. No apps involved whatsoever.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _Spotify Connect is a real game changer._
|
| That sounds like a minor quality of life feature, hardly a
| "game changer". Do you think this is impossible for other
| companies to replicate?
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Have they replicated it widely though, and does their stuff
| work as seamlessly as Spotify's? Rather than look at
| hypotheticals about what others might offer, look at the
| present overall experience.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| > Do you think this is impossible for other companies to
| replicate?
|
| They are welcome to do so at any time of their choosing.
| It's only been an entire decade since the feature launched,
| I'm sure the competition will figure it out soon. For the
| most part, the only one I've seen that has more features
| than what is provided by basic google cast / airplay is
| ironically Youtube Music.
| htamas wrote:
| TIDAL has had it for a couple of years now
| https://tidal.com/connect
| anderber wrote:
| I thought other streaming services have similar
| functionality, right? I know Deezer has Deezer Connect.
| umeshunni wrote:
| TBH - this is the first time I've heard of Deezer and
| looking at their website - they seem to have ripped off
| every feature that Spotify has, including the end of year
| 'wrapped'.
| kenhwang wrote:
| This has been the biggest feature keeping me on Spotify.
|
| Tidal sorta has a connect feature, but I've found it to be
| really buggy (often wouldn't play or wouldn't tell the remote
| control device what is playing) and not as widely supported.
|
| Apple Music is even worse since tends to rely on AirPlay,
| which murders quality and requires the remote to stay on the
| same network as the player.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > What does Spotify really have?
|
| As far as I can tell, its biggest beneficiaries are the 3
| record labels who can use Spotify being one of its customers to
| be able to negotiate better terms with Apple/Alphabet/Amazon.
| guyzero wrote:
| Spotify is a sales channel. Walmart doesn't actually make
| anything, US car dealerships don't make anything. But they have
| customers and that's all it takes to sell something.
|
| And, strangely enough, once a sales channel is big enough it
| can begin taking a bigger slice of profits and telling
| suppliers what they should be doing (a la Walmart).
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| Walmart doesn't technically make anything (not sure if it's
| true to be honest) but they probably "enable" a lot of
| manufacturers to "make things" under their Great Value brand
| guyzero wrote:
| I suppose one could argue whether Walmart's primary value-
| add is sales or whether it's logistics, but certainly
| either of those is a higher priority than making things for
| consumers to sell. House brand items are still produced and
| packaged by some other company.
|
| The "logistics" of Spotify's business are mostly
| commoditized (storage, computer, app development), but
| certainly they have label relationships that would be hard
| for a new competitor to replicate. But the key part is that
| for whatever reason 226 million people have given Spotify
| their credit card number (or local analog) which makes them
| pretty important to record labels.
| sb8244 wrote:
| That's pretty new in the grand scheme of things? They
| started making things under their brand once they became
| established.
|
| I could see Spotify doing the same thing. Particularly
| around live ticketing, merch, etc.
| amanda99 wrote:
| They are a music distributor, and they have good relationships
| with the rights holders and will do their legwork for them.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| Yeah it's just playlists and network effects, mostly.
|
| There's a Spotify playlist for everything, young people
| regularly share Spotify playlists each other, and for many: the
| hardest part about switching to another service is losing
| access to those playlists.
|
| The "official" playlists provide two other functions. One is to
| initially amplify artists. Record labels can buy slots on these
| playlists, just like they used to buy airtime on the FM radio
| stations of yesteryear.
|
| The second is that Spotify can use its own filler muzak on its
| playlists to keep licensing costs down. E.g. they pay a pianist
| to play generic "Christmas piano music," make up an artist
| name, and put a bunch of those songs on its official holiday
| playlists.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| I like their music discovery functions e.g. generated playlists
| and song/playlist/artist "radio". My playlist variety expanded
| greatly over the past 3 years because of these features from
| Spotify. A centralized platform that is relatively to use
| (nonsensical UI changes aside) is a strong incentive for users
| to stay, though by no means a moat.
|
| The end game was always about rapidly burning VC money to
| acquire more users, while kicking the can of profit-making down
| the road. Now ZIRP has ended for the time being, the chicken
| has finally come home to roost.
| sb8244 wrote:
| Deezer costs more for family than I pay now on Spotify. Why
| switch?
| deng wrote:
| Parental control. Spotify has basically no QC on uploaded
| podcasts, and it is filled with video podcasts with stupid
| TikToks, porn disguised as "ASMR", and lots of garbage used
| for money laundering.
| dalbasal wrote:
| So...
|
| Bodybuilders do this thing called "bulking and cutting." The best
| way to add muscle fast is to overeat. Work out lots. Sleep lots.
| Eat lots.
|
| You get fat, but you also get muscular because food is never a
| limiting factor.
|
| Then, they lose the extra fat with a crash diet.
|
| Google, FB and such are such money machines that they never have
| to cut. They can just bulk. The others... they want some of that
| rapid growth potential too, but can't afford to add fat forever.
|
| Corporate bulking and cutting.
| righthand wrote:
| But Google and Facebook did cut earlier this year?
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| There is only so much metaphorical food in the world.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| This analogy doesn't seem to add any explanatory power.
|
| Corporations can't magically know the optimal number of
| employees to maximize profits. And even if they could this will
| change over time. So we should expect them to cut when they
| have too many and hire when they have too few.
| blehn wrote:
| What "muscle" did spotify add? Not sure the metaphor works.
| It's bloat from bad management and copying what other companies
| are doing.
| ssnistfajen wrote:
| >Google, FB and such are such money machines that they never
| have to cut.
|
| Not sure what you are trying to achieve by saying something so
| blatantly untrue that a two-word query into any search engine
| can debunk it as fast as your browser loads a web page.
| brainzap wrote:
| "whats my purpose?" you play music, and maybe display lyrics
| dcchambers wrote:
| This absolutely sucks for those involved, especially given the
| timing. Not only does it add stress to an already stressful time
| of year for many, but hiring typically slows down in December
| anyway. That said it's good to see five months of severance pay.
| Hopefully long enough that the effected folks can take a little
| time off to refresh themselves, not stress about finances, and
| give the industry time to pick up hiring again in 2024 once new
| annual budgets kick in...
| atbpaca wrote:
| I wish CEOs would resign when layoffs happen. It should be like
| some governments where the whole cabinet resigns. If layoffs are
| a necessity, then the CEO and the top management should show the
| example and take responsibility for taking the company into the
| wrong direction, leading to layoffs. That would be fair and more
| understable than a "thank you for your hard work and commitment".
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Business decisions are difficult. If the result of everyone
| that didn't pan out was "you are fired", no one would take any
| risk, decisions would take forever.
|
| It's so hard to fire people in France, that some large
| companies simply have a policy of "no france office".
| ep103 wrote:
| And yet companies are founded every day in France, and their
| economy is doing just fine.
|
| If a business cannot afford to do business in a country, then
| that business should not be allowed to do business in that
| country.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Nope. The french economy been flatlining for 15 years:
|
| https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD?locatio
| n...
|
| US GDP per person is now 50% higher than france:
|
| https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/gdp-per-capita/
|
| It wasn't like that 15 years ago.
|
| There doesn't need to be another rule. The existing rules
| are doing just fine keeping companies out.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| Wouldn't this result in CEO's never doing a layoff or admitting
| the business needs one?
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Almost every suggestion to help employees doesn't consider
| the second order effects.
| neop1x wrote:
| They have 9,500 employees, yet their web app doesn't even offer a
| simple feature to speed up a podcast. How pathetic...
| zaps wrote:
| I still can't get Backstage set up correctly.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-12-04 23:02 UTC)