- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
They could easily pay those workers by terminating the contract with Rogan
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.
Big tech used to be built on the idea that you could work on a moonshot idea, have it fail, and then be reassigned to something new, or swallowed into new orgs. This way, you could work on the next Zune, Fire Phone, or Circles, and not fear for your job - like you would if you worked for a startup.
Now, they don’t give a fuck. If the moonshot fails, they move the exec to a new org, and fire the entire team. It means that companies like Spotify can diversify their offering while saving money, and due to the poor hiring market and general apathy of tech workers, they just deal with it.
I think Joe was out of things to say 10 years ago. You could replace him with AI and never know the difference.
I don’t think AI speaks “knuckledragger” well enough
You’re overestimating the intelligence and ability of his listeners if you think they’d notice the difference.
deleted by creator
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
Uh… Ok… Wow. So you understand how businesses work?
You can be pissed off but he is still the number 1 listed/watched podcast in the world. It brings in subscribers.
Fuck Joe Rogan
As someone who’s been out of the loop. Why do so many people hate Joe Rogan?
He has done a lot to help spread things like anti-vaxxer lies. He’s given platform to shitty right wingers and treated their ideas as reasonable alternatives to more mainstream views. He generally has presented his views as moderate and he’s “just asking questions” which seems disingenuous.
He generally comes off as an idiot who likes money, but being responsible about what he allows on his show is not a big concern as long as the dollars keep flowing
I agree. Doesn’t charge reality. Man it’s hard for people to accept Rogan prints money and the comment made no sense.
millions of flies cannot be wrong!
Money from flies spends just as well as money from butterflies.
The hate I’m getting for pointing out objective reality is pretty terrible. There is a whole lot of copium around his popularity.
Doesn’t matter if you like their taste or not. It makes money.
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
Do they rehire after the investors meeting?
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.
I know people who support this philosophy (business owners and investors, of course), framing it as getting rid of the lowest performers. They think 10% yearly turnover is healthy. Morale is so low at the businesses they run they usually don’t have to lay off. It’s probably more like they lose their top 10% yearly.
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…
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.
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.
And if you block the Facebook domains the app doesn’t work.
OK, fuck you Spotify.
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
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.
to make the worst UX bugged up PoS app in the entire play store
Seems to be a lot of competition there.
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.
What do you do for music instead?
I whystle
My mp3 collection is 2 weeks long.
In a lot of ways, this is where I’d like to be, but my mind hesitation to jump from Spotify (and comparable services) is the ability to discover new music across a crazy variety of genres. Especially since it’s stable and uses the same controls every time, I think I’d have a hard time leaving.
Big tech got me addicted like that.
That’s the only thing I don’t self host. I enjoy discovering new music from various genres. I reminisce of the days when you would ask someone to send you a track you just heard over Bluetooth to your Nokia.
Those are rookie numbers! Get back to me when your in the GB’s
Last I checked, when it says only a day long, it was 15 GB. It’s been a few years.
They mistyped. They meant Petabytes
Did you say pita bites? I could go for a gyro
thank goodness for (internet) radio
I use ViMusic, which I downloaded from F-droid
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!
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.
Maybe they could try not paying a fascist $200 million for his podcast. That would save some money right there.
Only if his podcast has fewer subscribers than generate $200M revenue
You can’t sub to podcasts on spotify like that. He just makes money on contract.
I meant for Spotify
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.
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.
I agree that’s probably their main issue right now, and they’re hardly unique there. You’ve seen layoffs and belt tightening everywhere as the free money faucets have dried up.
That said, I think the core business model isn’t exactly challenging. Similarly to Netflix ten years ago, they’re primarily serving content that they don’t own, but unlike Netflix, they’re probably not going to be able to pivot into content creation unless they want to actually become a proper label, and even then, they’d need big enough stars that other distribution platforms can’t afford to not cooperate with them. Otherwise, they’re always going to be at the mercy of the labels, though there is some balance, since the labels also need the streaming platforms to at least survive.
And this is why they focus and promote the podcasts so much. Podcasts don’t have any label intermediate
Well I guess I did correct by switching to Tidal. From Apple Music. Until Tidal does the same, I guess.
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
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’ve never seen this myself fwiw
You know what really abouts the flying f out of me?
Even if I start with something quite heavy like system of a down, ace of spades or whatever it always ends up after half an hour with ballads, soft rock and what have you. Elevator music.
Why. Why? Wasn’t I clear ? I want metal. And lots of it. That’s what i started with. Not muzak. Stay with the genre. Not jump them.
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.
And then Spotify will be €50 a month because costs.
This is all your fault, you goddamn white noise listeners!
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.
Unfortunate to see.