Hundreds of Spotify staff stream out the door in latest layoffs Stop us if you've heard this one before: the CEO at a well-known technology company writes a letter to staff, laying off hundreds. Said CEO accepts responsibility for assuming a pandemic boom year would mean higher sustained growth rates, but it didn't, so sacrifices must be made. By the rank-and-file, of course, not by said …
Spotify is a really odd company. They have attracted lots of investment and have millions of users. I am a user as the service is super convenient and very reasonably priced. They came in a "disruptor" and they have certainly disrupted the music industry and inspired a lot of competitors. However, they have never made a full year profit and they've made it much harder for smaller artists to make money due to the pittance of streaming royalties. So they've turned the industry on its head, but they also can't make a profit. Unless they have a secret plan to one day triple subscription charges I really don't understand their long term business goals. There's some really strange economics going on with internet companies these days.
I trialled Spotify a year ago and found that it didn't recommend very many of the big name artists in the genres I listen to. I assumed at the time, apropos of nothing, that this was because the big artists (or their labels) had negotiated more favourable royalties, so it was in Spotify's interest to serve up the "cheaper stuff". Whether this is true or not I don't know but I found it quite refreshing and I was able to expand my library significantly.
Unless they have a secret plan to one day triple subscription charges I really don't understand their long term business goals. There's some really strange economics going on with internet companies these days.
Basically it's VC money subsidising our listening habits (in a similar way that VC's subsides Uber taxi rides).
Being able to listen to almost anything I want for less than what we used to pay for a CD each month is an amazing deal for consumers. As you say it obviously won't last and hopefully at some point the streamers will start paying the artists more fairly[0]
[0] I do buy downloads from Bandcamp before someone says something!
WARN typically requires 2 months.
"Good" companies sometimes give some number of weeks (e.g. 1-2) on top of that per X years of service, some of them cap it at a few months. So it can add up for long-timers. Especially for US companies which still have PTO/vacation policies as an accrued expense, because that needs to be cashed-out as well. Ditto (usually) for other accrued things like company sabbaticals if it's been earned by the time the layoff triggers, etc.
So yeah, 5 months total isn't bad, relatively speaking. Remembering that they're still out of a job in any case.
A global streaming business which needs infrastructure maintained in multiple places and monitored for scaling as well as functionality, working with artists and recording companies requiring salespeople and contract lawyers, makes money from advertising and thus needs people to work with advertisers in all the major markets, and also owns a lot of podcasts which involves the work of a media company as well. Yes, you end up finding new tasks to do which requires hiring more people to get them done. Writing an app that can play some audio files off this server over here takes a single person or more likely a small team. Scaling it up to the level described is another problem. Doing that while making money is even more challenging, and from the sound of it they haven't figured that part out.
I've been a paid subscriber for around a decade now. It is convenient, the streaming quality is good. However, why is it such crap at rotating THROUGH your playlist on shuffle? I have a playlist with over 300 songs in it, yet I continually hear the same 40 songs over and over. It isn't a difficult concept to put the entire playlist into an array and iterate through it....
Probably because, as with so many "internet" companies, it's their way or the highway. Maybe, as someone else mentioned, it's related to royalty payments.
Just look at something like Kodi[*]. It's free, open source, made by unpaid volunteers and you can choose from many different "look and feel" interfaces and a working playlist randomiser. I don't know of any streaming services, paid or free, that let you choose how the media is presented. They all seem to be designed to make you listen to or watch their choices on a screen designed for touch scrolling. It's bloody hard work identifying some albums or TVshows/films from thumbnails because the title style, font and colour changes on each one. No one provides a simple text/list option. The thumbnail display works if you know what you are looking for but is shit for quickly browsing for something that looks interesting.
* I'm just a happy user, no other connection to the project.
Helluvit is, after one member of the CEO Club uses an excuse like this out loud in public, it becomes easier for the rest of them to do it.
It's no less shameful, but after the pundits and financial analysts and other media hear the same mea culpa at a few quarterly results meetings, they stop making a big deal out of it, maybe even stop reporting on it at all -- it's not "news" anymore, eh?
The rest of the CEO's are just as responsible and should be held just as accountable as the first, but since they're pretty consistently rich folks with big ole generous parachutes in their guaranteed employment contracts, there really isn't that much "accountability" for the big bosses to begin with, is there....
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