Apple Music Competitor Spotify Lays Off Over 1,000 Employees

[mdatwood]

Yup! This like what happened to Sirius/XM with Howard Stern. Payed him a ton of money, serveral channels devoted to him. Because of limited satillite bandwidth, Music stations were eliminated, and the rest were cut way back on quality. AM radio sounded better. Subscribers left in mass. Now Nobody really cares about subscribing to them, and I'm an old boomer, I quit them when this happned.

I don't think that's true. Sirius peaked (covid bump) and has bounced around its highs +/- 1M for a while. If anything, streaming providers like Spotify are what's hindering Sirius and Stern is the only thing keeping them relevant [1].

Rogan isn't really my cup of tea, but he has an enormous audience. He's also streamed royalty free, so Spotify doesn't have to give 70% of Rogan revenues to any labels. I'd have to dig into SPOT financials to see if they share anything else.

[1] https://www.thethings.com/joe-rogan...sXM Pandora has around 34 million subscribers.

 

[1129846]

Every tech company except maybe Apple over hired the last few years. Now that rates are going up and we're mostly returning to 'normal', those companies are correcting the over-hiring. Spotify in particular only recently barely started making a profit after years of losses so they acutely feel the rate increase.

Dont be so sure on Apple. If you look closer at even Apple they are cutting their contractor staff pretty hard which precedes layoffs with out them having to do layoffs.

 

[ApAx]

Yearly budgets, set in last few months of the current year, don't care about holiday seasons. If your company runs Jan-Dec fiscally, that's just too bad for you as far as the bottom line is concerned.

 

[topdrawer]

anyone that uses spotify is unethical.

 

[BuffaloTF]

Yup! This like what happened to Sirius/XM with Howard Stern. Payed him a ton of money, serveral channels devoted to him. Because of limited satillite bandwidth, Music stations were eliminated, and the rest were cut way back on quality. AM radio sounded better. Subscribers left in mass. Now Nobody really cares about subscribing to them, and I'm an old boomer, I quit them when this happned.

That’s really not at all what happened. He had 3 channels, nothing was lost, audio quality was always garbage but better than XM, they gained a ton of subscribers to the point they bought out XM; and against all odds, have been growing ever since.

 

[Bigkool2inSC]

Why did Spotify need almost 6,000 employees in the first place?!?

Curators for all those playlists...(now done by AI)

 

[gsurf123]

"Spotify employees that are impacted by layoffs will be notified by Tuesday, December 5."

It's always nice learning that your company is RIF'ing a 1000 people from the media, and one of those might be you. Dick move not telling your employees first. Is Bill Lumberg in charge of this reduction in force?

I don’t know about the EU but if you are of a certain size you have to report the layoffs to the government in advance.

 

[gsurf123]

If Spotify is having issues financially it’s probably a good time for Apple to swoop in and buy them out. The only way streaming becomes profitable is with less competition.

They won’t buy garbage when they will get the customers anyway.

 

[SnowCrocodile]

This fear of firing during holidays really seems to be an american thing? Too many ”lampoon” movies?

Spotify is not an American company, though.

 

[Muzzakus]

Yeah, maybe we don't have a clue, but how does an an app need 6,000 people to keep it up & running?!

Gluttony of over investment by VC’s. **** will normalise over time

 

[TechnoMonk]

Dont be so sure on Apple. If you look closer at even Apple they are cutting their contractor staff pretty hard which precedes layoffs with out them having to do layoffs.

Contractors is what you want to cut. Apple core technology resources are mostly their full time employees. When you start cutting your core, that’s where the problems start. Apple outsources lot of non core IT to contractors and service providers.

 

[1129846]

Contractors is what you want to cut. Apple core technology resources are mostly their full time employees. When you start cutting your core, that’s where the problems start. Apple outsources lot of non core IT to contractors and service providers.

They would source a lot more than that. Biggest thing is yeah that is what you want to cut but at the levels Apple is cutting it is pretty big. I have been at other places that cut their entire contracting force and did it rapidally. Even though no full times got laid off it still puts a huge damper on moods in the area and still makes everything feels weird. Big time as the contractors know a few weeks out they are getting cut so it makes the moral dropped a lot.

It is only a step above but still not fun to be around when head count starts dropping contractor or not. You do get to know them and work with them for months to even years. Often times some of those contractors have been there for a very long time and well known and respected.

 

[CarAnalogy]

You don't get Youtube Music "without charging me a penny" unless you subscribe to Youtube premium, which I have zero interest in doing.

It is interesting how mixed opinions are about this. Some people consider it getting YouTube Premium for "free", some consider it the reverse. And a lot of people apparently wish they would split them back into two services.

Definitely a strange approach but I think it probably net results in an overall increase of one service "propping up" the other, especially with family plans where some may want music and not youtube and vice versa.