this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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Anyone knows why Spotify needed 9000 employees in the first place?
Probably devs, updates, the verification and review process for music, reports. Apparently they also create playlists by hand.
The annoying ads also won't create themselves. There's a lot of effort being put into making them as annoying as possible actually.
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.
Yeah, their smart random, or whatever they call it, is horrible. Thank God clicking it again removes the garbage it added to a playlist.
I've had nothing but trouble with the Spotify app.
And if you block the Facebook domains the app doesn't work.
OK, fuck you Spotify.
it's been draining battery like crazy for me recently. I'd listen to music for an hour in the morning, and in the afternoon it'd show up as the first or second position on battery stats with "10 hours in background". it would also take its sweet time to load a playlist that I've downloaded for offline use when I was in a poor reception area, I assume because of the playlist "enhancing" or "smart shuffle", even though I've had those disabled. I've decided to temporarily move over to Deezer until I use my subscription to rip my music library, and then go back to using a local music library as the lawd intended us to do.
Only reason I ever used it was because my ex had it at the time, after we broke up, I said good riddance.
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.
You have to keep in mind that they operate all over the world. Each country has its own labels and messy negotiations to do. Doing literally anything on a global scale takes a lot of people, no matter what it is, just to navigate the differing business environments.
So we should expect their legalese and marketing departments to be the heaviest staffed then, right?
Mind, I'm not disagreeing with you, you make a very good point. Licensing is arcanely complex, and it's different for every country. Also makes sense to me that legal and marketing would be significantly impacted by all this.
Almost like you'd need a top level org for both legal and marketing (2 orgs) then sub organizations for each country/legal domain.
Seems like that could require quite a few people.
Edit: holy non-words, autoincorrect.
That's my point. But not "9000 people" many people. That's an ABSURD number, that's almost certainly more people than there are record labels with nonstandard/custom contracts with spotify...
Trying to come up with rough IT numbers and I don't think I could break 500 (depends on how much they self-host and not considering contractors). Even if I bump it up to 4500 it seems insane for a large "digital distribution" company to have 50% of its workforce to be non-IT.
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.
Yeah that is a huge number
to make the worst UX bugged up PoS app in the entire play store
Seems to be a lot of competition there.
It doesn't surprise me all that much, as someone that works for a big tech company.
A small number of that will be IC's and managers that keep the services going, alongside people that create FOH stuff. Alongside that, they'll likely have a lot of people in data storage, data science, perhaps even research science. Put these across multiple continents and timezones, and you've likely got a few thousand.
The majority after this are likely upper management, sales and account staff (you'd be shocked at how many of these exist in media tech), and internal teams. Again, put these around the world, maybe even more so, as some account staff will work with people in local markets, so you'll have people in dozens of countries.
Operationally, they need nowhere near this amount, but if you want to achieve "growth" you need all the supporting stuff.