They could easily pay those workers by terminating the contract with Rogan
this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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They also bought Michelle Obama and Duke&Duchess of Essex as podcasters. Not saying these are equivalent to Rogan, just that they seem to be burning money on things that has nothing to do with music. And I'm very much not a fan of fucking up podcasts as a simple medium delivered by RSS. I have a futile hope that that decision will burn them.
if it's not available via RSS then it's not a podcast, it's an audio show.
They're investing heavily in podcasts because podcasts are far, far more profitable than music. If they can get people used to (and hooked) on listening to podcasts (any podcasts) through Spotify then all that money spent on popular podcasters will be worth it (in the end).
I'm sure Spotify would love it if they could stop streaming music entirely and just focus on podcasts. Streaming music costs them a ton of money and overhead (bureaucracy associated with keeping track of and paying artists globally with bazillions of laws and regulations and fees to navigate) whereas podcasts just cost bandwidth.
I hate that you’re right. I listen to 0 podcast, it’s just not my format, yet they constantly push it in my face
And I'm very much not a fan of fucking up podcasts as a simple medium delivered by RSS. I have a futile hope that that decision will burn them.
This was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. When they started locking up shows to their app, I cancelled my subscription and dropped Spotify entirely. I don't even listen to any of the shows they bought but I do listen to a lot of podcasts through Pocket Casts and take umbrage when anybody fucks with the standards.
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I think Joe was out of things to say 10 years ago. You could replace him with AI and never know the difference.
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Just as they announced their profitable quarter.
This isn't to "Save costs". It's to further boost profits at any measure, which is what publically traded companies want. Happy investors.
profit has been tasted, now unfettered greed takes over
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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.
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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.
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Oh, hey, look at that. I just axed Spotify to save myself money. Fuck Spotify.
I said, 'fuck it, why not?' when the whole joe rogan boycott happened. Have not missed Spotify one bit since.
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How do they have this many employees and an absolutely trash android app?
A lot of these “auto-pilot” apps have thousands of people employed, I don’t get it. Like, what is there to work on once you have things working pretty well? If anything they just start ruining the product over time…
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To be fair, even Apple Music and Tidal are trash on Android. And Apple is a $3 trillion company with over 150k employees.
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.
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If the workers of Spotify had been unionized then the CEO Daniel Ek wouldn't have been able to fire 1500 people by sending them an email.
The first quarter they are profitable ever: AXE THEM!
Didn't they also slash how much they pay artists? What exactly is the point of Spotify?
The point is to make as much profit as possible without losing too many subscribers. This includes cutting expenses both internally and externally
Wow essentially like any other company
It's not like they're firing 1500 to survive
No it's min-maxing
Short term profit
Not really, they set a "minimum threshold" of unique annual listeners to get a payout. If a song has at least 1000 unique listeners per year it gets the same payout it did before. If it gets 999 it gets zero.
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Yes, fire everybody. That's surely a fantastic long term plan to make that all-important line go up.
Maybe they could try not paying a fascist $200 million for his podcast. That would save some money right there.
Fuck Spotify and fuck Joe Rogan.
As much as I dislike Rogan, he's hardly a fascist. He's just an idiot that agrees with anyone speaking confidently for more than 5 seconds.
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Well I guess I did correct by switching to Tidal. From Apple Music. Until Tidal does the same, I guess.
Because of interest rates hikes, companies like Spotify have to focuses on more trivial matters like being profitable. 17% lay off seems like a lot. I wonder if they will go bankrupt?
They reported a 65m profit on the quarter before these layoffs. I don't think they're going bankrupt unless this last quarter has been a disaster for them.
Spotify's issue isn't unique. Fundamentally, given how much money the labels demand and how relatively low streaming subscription fees are, there's simply not a ton of money around. Spotify has been unprofitable for most of the past few years. The fact of the matter is that people expect to be able to listen to essentially all music for a relatively cheap price, and labels expect to get most of that money. The specifics of the company don't matter much. If Spotify dies, people will migrate to another platform, and the finances won't be meaningfully different there. Maybe someone like Apple could afford to eat the losses or is actually big enough to tell the labels to pound sand, but otherwise, this is just kinda what the situation is.
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Hopefully this includes the guy that changed it so there's always some Taylor Swift song instead of what I was actually listening to last when I open the app.
Sincere question: do you use a unique, secure password on your Spotify account, and are you sure that it's never been compromised? Your story sounds very similar to a case where a Spotify account was being used by someone else.
Reply All episode about it: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/j4he7lv
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Fire the payola people that make it so even if you hit shuffle, you'll only hear the same 10% of your playlist over and over again with the same artist 3 songs in a row.
They say that they can't release their randomizer algorithm to protect trade secrets. Which is exactly what a company engaging in payola would say.
And then Spotify will be €50 a month because costs.
This is all your fault, you goddamn white noise listeners!
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