I would’ve never guessed that Spotify had more than 1,600 employees in total, or that 1,600 only accounted for 17% of their workforce.
So they have around 9,500 employees, for a global corporation it doesn't seem that many.
You have to account for various positions like legal staff to handle contracts with artists and enterprise customers, across literally every jurisdiction in the world. Then, other supporting roles like marketing, sales, cleaning and management.
What really surprised me was that among those 9,500 employees around 6,000 of them are software engineers. 500 would have been my first guess accounting for the infrastructure size, the number of platforms they support, the complexity of the features, and the need for 24/7 support around the globe.
As a personal anecdote, the ratio of software engineers in the companies I have worked for was around 20%, ie 1 engineer for every 5 staff.
I would really like to see an organisation tree, how many teams are there and what are they working on???
i imagine spotify at its core as a lot like mr burns' heart
doing this is general is evil, doing this right before the holidays is intentionally cruel -- a signal to fellow vampires and business goons that wE aRen't AFRAid To mAKe THe touGH choICes!!!. i mean, i've been rooting for them to crash and burn for ages because their entire service and philosophy about music (sorry, 'content') is so utterly misguided and malignant. i'd rather go back to record labels than have this band of tech bro dipshits controlling everything
We have computed the data sir. Our employees are costing us money that should be a profit going to you! Lets tell like 1600 to get bent? Cool? Aiight.
I used Pandora for a long time. I was relatively happy with it. I usually start with someone's existing station and then thumbs down and thumbs up the various songs to fine tune it to what I like.
After years of hearing about Spotify, which I thought was a paid service, I found out it was free. I decided to give it a go. I created an account and signed in and picked a channel of what was popular on Spotify.
The very first song was one I didn't like. I tried to skip it and couldn't. I tried to "thumbs down" it, Pandora style, so it wouldn't play that song again. No such feature. I looked for a way to never play music from that artist. I couldn't. I left Spotify after less than one song.
With how aggressively they seem to shove music you don't like in your face, I am not really surprised they aren't doing well.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
Daniel Ek, Spotify’s billionaire founder and chief executive, revealed that the company had decided to cut 17% of its workforce, the third and steepest round of redundancies of 2023.
Ek told employees they would receive a calendar invitation “within the next two hours from HR for a one-on-one conversation” if they were affected by the cuts, in a message to staff published on Spotify’s website on Monday.
Big tech companies ranging from Meta and Microsoft to Amazon and Alphabet have retrenched and made large-scale redundancies during 2023 after interest rates rose and investors focused on their ability to cut costs to protect profits.
Spotify continues to maintain high-value podcasting tie-ups, including a controversial deal with Joe Rogan and others with the influencer Emma Chamberlain and the comedian Trevor Noah.
Ek said Spotify had taken advantage of cheap borrowing during 2020 and 2021, when central bankers cut interest rates sharply in response to coronavirus pandemic lockdowns, but that “we now find ourselves in a very different environment”.
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