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.
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.
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 Cloud's selling point is that you won't have to spend 6 months filling out forms to get a single out of date VM (yes, that happened to me).
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?
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.
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”
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.
>"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.
> 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.
how did you see this. How do you know what all the discounts and backdoor deals that were applied to the bill. How do you know the final amount that was paid out.
i am skeptical that some rando is privy to this information.
This is a wild leap of twisted logic. You posit that they might not have to lay off employees if they instead.... Paid a team to manage their infrastructure instead of outsourcing that responsibility to the cloud.
"..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.
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.
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.
I wonder how much of this is led by the likes of paying $200 million to sign up Joe Rogan or $25 million for Harry and Megan. That's a big chunk of change. 9,000 employees too - 17% of the workforce out the door.
Spotify made a gamble that having some headline Podcasters would build the listener market. Podcasters release regularly and have a different potential for becoming viral compared to musicians so it's a valid commercial decision to make.
Seems like their headline gambles didn't work but googling suggests that the podcast listener market increased 10% in the last year so I think they'll probably try again.
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.
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.
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".
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".
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.
>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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
You will hear more about the new term "RIF" not - reduction in force.
Nobody likes to say we had layoffs, so corporate speak will be - we did a RIF ...blah blah.
It's terrible, because i love playing guitar, and they are screwing with the english language as normal people use it.
> In the past, layoffs typically came with an expectation that the employee might be rehired if more work became available or the employer’s financial condition improved. An RIF, on the hand, did not come with such an expectation; it usually meant that a certain position or an entire department was being eliminated. https://www.lawyers.com/legal-info/labor-employment-law/rif-...
> 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.
[+] [-] mrbonner|2 years ago|reply
- 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.
[+] [-] dijit|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] marcinzm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ctvo|2 years ago|reply
> 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?
[+] [-] blcknight|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] spaceywilly|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cedws|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaw12|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bogomipz|2 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] soderfoo|2 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] apwell23|2 years ago|reply
how did you see this. How do you know what all the discounts and backdoor deals that were applied to the bill. How do you know the final amount that was paid out.
i am skeptical that some rando is privy to this information.
[+] [-] ttymck|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tootie|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kranke155|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mouzogu|2 years ago|reply
> “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|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rchaud|2 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] draw_down|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mahmoudhossam|2 years ago|reply
Meanwhile artists are getting paid next to nothing and now even workers are getting the short end of the stick.
[+] [-] jaymzcampbell|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] badcppdev|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] anon23432343|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gardenhedge|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Neil44|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wombat-man|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atbpaca|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielmarkbruce|2 years ago|reply
It's so hard to fire people in France, that some large companies simply have a policy of "no france office".
[+] [-] DiggyJohnson|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] byyll|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] htrp|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pdimitar|2 years ago|reply
9000 employees. My gods.
What are all these people doing?!
[+] [-] techstacktoe|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] semi-extrinsic|2 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] FirmwareBurner|2 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDfNRWsMRsU
[+] [-] emodendroket|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Y-bar|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thiago_fm|2 years ago|reply
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|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ardit33|2 years ago|reply
PS. Spotify had already two layoffs, once 6% in Jan 2023 and 2% in June. This combined seems like a 25% ish cut.
[+] [-] pembrook|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] s3p|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] konschubert|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] dboreham|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] surgical_fire|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Solvency|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sitkack|2 years ago|reply
They bulked up, built their products and now want to slim down and enjoy their profits at the expense of these sacrificial workers.
[+] [-] softwaredoug|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jamesblonde|2 years ago|reply
It's terrible, because i love playing guitar, and they are screwing with the english language as normal people use it.
[+] [-] epistasis|2 years ago|reply
> 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-...
[+] [-] charles_f|2 years ago|reply
... 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.