Spotify to axe 1,500 workers to save costs

I don't think AI speaks "knuckledragger" well enough

I don’t hate the man like a lot of people here but this a really good point.

The opposite. He never had anything to say, he was just a great interviewer.

The problem is he started believing he had something to say, and started talking over guests he disagrees with... The last one I watched the guest spoke for less than 2 minutes before Joe went on a 5+ minute rant about how he didn't believe it. I can't even remember what it was about, because the guy didn't even get to lay out his argument

We got it Joe, you think the world is a magical place and have strong opinions on how humans should interact. Let the science man talk

Fuck Joe Rogan

millions of flies cannot be wrong!

Maybe not rehire, but many companies will actively continue hiring just as many as they lay off. Citibank did this for years. Announce layoffs of 5,000 employees, stock goes up, but also hire 5,000 with no announcement.

Does it eventually kill the company to do this? In many cases, yes.

Rarely. They'll hire for some teams, but the roles were eliminated to directly reduce their headcount.

Companies want a revolving door of talent, but they also want fewer people...

Wow, i really need to stop using spotify. 9000 people somehow created the worst algorithm possible. I have 800 songs in my playlist and their "randomiser" is the worst thing i have ever seen. I accidentally added one stand up track and all their enhanced randomiser adds are comedy tracks. And not even new ones, it's always the same ones. The app is dumb as hell. Click a odcast accidentally and never get rid of it from the home screen ever again. Instead of paying their artists or apparently workers, they aquire shit like joe rogan.

Each of those should be a team, not a 1k+ person department. A few tens of engineers for dev, the same for QA and DevOps, then maybe a few hundred employees for all the review processes, marketing, relationships with music labels&advertisers, etc.

Discord famously runs (ran) with 50-odd engineers. Silicon Valley's VC-backed economy is famously terrible with over-highering by orders of magnitude, and since interest rates went up some of those companies realized that maybe they should stop burning so much money.

My buddy works there now, as the audiobook company he worked for got acquired by them.

You would be shocked how stupid and manual the content acquisition process is. Book publishers might as well still be operating back in the 90s, it's all phone calls and spreadsheets attached to the emails and manual FTP uploads.

If the music business is anything like the audiobook business they likely need so many non IT just to keep the machine fed with content.

That is what I was thinking, too. Maybe it's really just marketing, hand curated content like someone commented or something else non technical.

I saw banks being maintained by 10-20 people.

Seems to be a lot of competition there.

What do you do for music instead?

Probably data-analysis/AI type stuff to track users and advertise "better," making the backend more efficient to reduce costs, and adding support for new hardware. A lot of big, very profitable companies also have skunkworks-like projects for exploring new ideas and prototypes, most of which never make it into production.

Tbh most employees at a company this size become risk mitigation more than anything else. Once you've reached a certain level of success, you're looking at what doesn't move the needle as much as what makes it move positively. There could be a feature that is a major QoL improvement, but because in a test segment it performed 1% worse than base then it won't be implemented.

Spotify, I believe, still works in the tribe and guild model that they created.

Chapter = people with the same skill set, squad = a group of people from different chapters focused on a single project, tribe = a group of squads focused on a large business goal, guild = a collective of folks who have a shared interest like Data Privacy.

Suffice to say, Agile is an imperfect tool and as you try to scale it, you need an increasing number of people to support it and make it run. Coders and Designers are likely just a fraction of their head count.

I've worked places that don't have that support structure in place and they've stagnated for years struggling to get the most basic of decisions made. Decisions is what it is about too. Rarely do you get actual leadership from the c-level and especially from a CEO. So you end up with a lot of cooks trying to work out why the broth doesn't taste quite right and lacking confidence to just add a bit of salt.

In my experience it's always new apps that ruin the existing experience.

Well, they have to make new, broken terrible features and then come fix them when people complain by basically putting it back to how it was.

It's both amazing and annoying that Google is perfectly able to create useful apps for iOS (despite the huge limitations the OS imposes) but Apple can't figure out how to make any Android app that isn't utter crap with fewer restrictions imposed on them.

@d3Xt3r
@hesusingthespiritbomb

Wow essentially like any other company

It's 1000 playbacks, not 1000 unique listeners.

You say that like it's a defense though.

Yeah they're paying the people who make the product we sell so little that they don't even get enough money in a paycheck to have it be worth sending them a paycheck!!

No, they spun it that way by deceptively going on a rant about how many "songs get fewer than 1000 plays ever" and doing the math based on that in the "article," but that's not what the change actually was. If you read the details of the change below that, it is that they will no longer pay out at all for songs that get fewer than 1000 unique listeners per year.

You still aren't talking a ton of money, but if each of 999 listeners streamed a song once per month, the artist could be losing close to $40 per song per year.

an idiot that agrees with anyone speaking confidently for more than 5 seconds.

Isn't that the bread and butter of Fascists? It is pretty much the hallmark of a Fascist movement to have a "confident speaker" to wow the masses.

You can't sub to podcasts on spotify like that. He just makes money on contract.

I think it's more related to rising interest rates which hasn't happened for decades now. I don't Spotify is in any real trouble tbh, it's just house cleaning and future planning given the business landscape changes.

No the queue will now add popular Playlists to what you were listening to when you restart the app if your previous queue was a generated one. Not sure the exact steps to cause it but it seems like if you were listening to a daily Playlist close the app, the next day the Playlist has updated and instead of pointing to the new daily it decides to point to one of the popular Playlist for your next songs in queue. It doesn't stop the song you paused on it just adds new shit to the queue after it once it loses track of where to point. Seems like they should just start shuffling your liked songs in that case but nope it points to a random pop Playlist.

I use a complex password. I don't see a way to view logged in devices but nothing else is fishy so I'm assuming it's something some marketing idiot came up with.