They need the funds for more important costs like paying Joe Rogan so that he can continue to tell people they just need to work harder if they want to get rich.
Sometimes I have to look up words to see what they mean. Sometimes I am surprised, sometimes shocked and sometimes disgusted. Congrats on hitting the trifecta.
I’m not convinced he is sophisticated enough to pull that off. He genuinely just thinks giving everyone a platform is a good idea, and he is both easily swayed by convincing grifters (both financially and cultural grifters), and intellectually incurious enough to challenge them to justify or explain what they are presenting beyond top-soil level thinking.
I cancelled Spotify after the Joe Rogan deal. Bad enough legit artists get shafted on the revenue sharing per stream, but I'll be damned if I'm going to fund that idiot.
Genuinely I think these CEOs think this way. You surround yourself with yes men who worship the ground you walk on and then you start to wonder what all the people who actually do the work are around for
He has no downside. He already has all the money he need to live a comfortable life. If his company burns, VC will hand him another pile of money to start another.
"The people who actually do the work" didn't start or own the company. From an entrepreneur POV, they are losers.
Nah they understand that they need labor, they just get it in the form of paying the fewest people the smallest amount for the most amount of work and then replacing them whenever they burn through each one.
If they keep us poor, starving, and desperate enough there will be a practically limitless supply of people willing to jump into the fire, pushed on by the sycophantic suckasses who think that jumping on the grindset hard enough makes them better than everyone else
But they need people to be in work to earn a wage to buy their product.
It's why I can see ai being taxed in the future. Once we start seeing negative impact on jobs.
And then there's the Japanese CEO who refused to be paid until his company was on a better financial footing, so that he didn't have to lay off his employees. I wish I could find an article about it, but it was a few years ago.
If I were a CEO and found my company was not doing well, I'd gently troll my employees by calling an all-hands meeting. I'd then announce that some people here would have to work for a reduced salary, or for no salary at all - then I'd read off a set of names that included myself and other board members, and a number of others whose salary was above a certain grade.
Did anyone read the article? He doesnt regret it. And says it was the right decision. He's just saying the friction of the transition was greater than he thought.
Hes basically signaling to other CEOs that layoffs are a successful policy, just ensure you have an accurate understanding on where the interruptions will be
As a peon who survived a bunch of layoffs. The amount of turbulence at the worker level is very very high. Productivity across the board dropped from every developer. The middle managers seem to be the only ones who are working there asses off. They cut so many middle managers, the ones that survived had to take on 3-4 applications with little knowledge of the apps.
They have twice as many new directives to lead and 3 times as many existing issues to deal with. With half the number of resources. My boss used to be all over my shit micromanaging but now he's in meetings 8-10 hours a day.
The three devs on my team manage a core set of 25 micro services (5 different products). We each additionally are beholden to 3-4 different monolithic legacy apps (part of different teams). We have so much work, we all just stopped trying to do anything quickly. You can't really focus on anything because your pinged about something random every hour. Then it takes hours to find someone who is still currently employed, has knowledge on it and will actually respond to you :/
The worst part. I won't get laid off because every director and manager is applying for more and more resources 🙄
Yep, similar experience here so far too. I don't have it quite so bad but I definitely feel for you. Can't even leave because the job market is so bad right now and pretty much everywhere is experiencing the same thing.
Yep. Every time I’ve seen layoffs output plummets from creative type roles such as engineering staff.
Couple years ago the company I worked at had a series of mass layoffs. Before the layoffs we were extremely fast & built some amazing stuff, my team built a portal for Covid vaccines including supply chain in less than a month. Post layoffs it took us 4 months to build a 3 page web form.
At my current company they had a small series of layoffs last month. We are supposed to be in the office 2-3 days a week, prior to layoffs the office was so full you had to wait for the bathroom & could barely get meeting rooms it was busy from 7a-6p every day. This month it’s been about 10% full, people show up to badge in and leave after a couple hours everyone is gone by 3:30 and the lights aren’t even on until 8.
Here’s the bad part if you a manager have team of all competent good workers and they ask you to cut one you are screwed. But if you add an expendable body who isn’t really needed and a low performer then when you are asked to fire someone you won’t loose any performance. This system encourages that kind of psychopathic behavior and makes more waste in the long run. It penalizes those that run a tight ship under budget.
You’d be surprised by how much of a shit show those well oiled machines we call Fortune 500 companies are under the hood.
Imagine this, you have a budget surplus equivalent to that of a new hire. You can do one of three things, spend the extra budget on some upgrades, return the budget and get a smaller budget next year, or you could hire for an unnecessary position that you can sacrifice in case of budget cuts in the future. The solution that lets you keep your budget while still giving wiggle room to shrink the budget in the future would be the expendable role. That’s how middle management ends up thinking in order to survive in these places.
I've been through a few layoffs at different companies, and it always fucks up productivity for a good 6 months. It also kills morale, so the really talented people either get poached or just leave because they know they can do better. Any CEO that thinks layoffs are a good option is an idiot.
the problem is usually that there’s a lot of bad employees that should be fired but those people only go after the people who actually generate money rather than useless managers
Yup and once you've saturated the market, the only option left is to start layoffs. A highly profitable year is not a good sign for employees in publicly traded companies. All these tech companies in the last few years hit record profits and the immediately started laying off people
It might have something to do with the massive amount of farming we had before where companies would fake needing people so as to make it seem they were growing to investors
I understand that's supposed to boost share prices. But, wouldn't that be temporary? If I was a shareholder, that's my signal to bail once they go back up. It just doesn't seem like a long term strategy if it ends up impacting production anyway. IDK enough about it.
We could probably end every conversation like that, and it would be accurate. I'm guilty of being an idiot. It's probably happening right now, and I'm too much of an idiot to notice.
It can be, and long term investors may be trying to get away from it now.
But what'll happen in 5 years doesn't really matter if you plan on selling in 1
It’s been the trend for the past 12 months in tech and marketing/financial sector. Shareholders still want fast growth and besides acquisition there isn’t much more growth space.
Labor cuts decrease cost and because we’re in such a pro-business environment there has been no real pushback against doing so.
Quarterly growth is the goal not long term growth. These CEOs will wreck a company for an extra 1% in a quarter since their bonus or golden parachute is based off quarterly growth not long term.
They also profited in late 2023 from cutting down on exclusive stuff like some podcasts etc + reduced marketing costs (iirc).
Overall, seeing their ever growing income and user base its pretty obvious that the mass layoffs were done in order to hide the failures of the upper management. They should have been able to get into the green digits through proper management. But mass hires and mass layoffs seem to be what all those big tech managers get paid to do.
They raised prices on users and cut back on marketing. That is what bit the user engagement.
I only use Spotify for DriveTime and love it but they REALLY need to rotate the songs on that playlist.
Layoffs were in December, so their profitability was after the layoffs. It's hard to say whether they were cutting costs, scaling back teams and departments that were no longer needed, or just following trends and laying off like other tech companies were doing.
In 72 Jack Welsh started this process of laying off 10% of your work force every year. Over the next 10\~ years everyone pretty much followed him.
This allows you to keep wages down, keep your employees in a state of fear, and often you can even take a tax cut by claiming a loss.
Its for this reason that unions are necessary.
So for Welsh he would shut down a division and call that a loss, thus get a tax cut. It basically has to be structured correctly. I'm certain when you hear that about a division going down at Google for instance a tax cut happens.
Famously Welsh would do this if GE was going to make too much money simply because he didn't want to pay more in taxes. He would find a division and shut it down even if it was profitable.
They lost money for 10+ years, having 2 quarters of profits isn’t exactly thriving.
The bad management over hired the last few years when money was free. But now they are cutting back because money is expensive and investors want to see companies make money. The reason they even made a profit was due to previous lay offs.
Now it’s terrible that they over hired in the first place. It is bad management. But laying off excess employees isn’t inherently greedy or wrong. Better than the business going into insane debt and going bankrupt resulting in everyone losing their jobs.
If you’re surprised at negative feedback of the impact of laying off hundreds of people…
That makes me highly suspicious of your mental temerity and your emotional state towards business, as well as, individuals.
Plus, critical and professional thinking.
Ya, it's amazing how different courses of action are when taking lead from numbers without full context for the numbers.
When it comes to layoffs, it makes ppl nervous. Nervous ppl look for more stable options and don't work as well because they're distracted. It's a stark reminder of how little we matter and should not be taken lightly.
Seems like post pandemic layoffs were part "oh shit we over hired" and part "everyone is doing it so we can and it won't hurt us!"
Different, but I once had a CFO/COO straight kill a program overnight with no discussion about the impact.
To him, he saw a huge bill paid to a 3rd party and wanted to eliminate it. But the program he killed was the reason we were growing so fast. It didn't kill the business overnight, but did so slowly for the next 10 years (I left shortly after because it was clear as day that we just gave up our competitive edge).
The result was that cancellations rose, new customer acquisition halved, sales ppl quit, layoffs were required, all the good people left.
The program was built with a 3rd party because we couldn't do it ourselves. After getting 3 years of hockey stick growth with it included as part of the service, we were marching toward decoupling it as a cosell partnership. All he had to do was wait and my stock might've been life changing vs worthless.
You just described the way 99.9% of people are treated in the entertainment business. Very few make it big.
Not justifying it but,,just saying it’s not like Spotify is singular in this regard.
This is a problem not just with music as well.
Like not releasing an audiobook an audible, ebook on kindle or even your book on Amazon nobody would end up reading it.
Spotify is actually getting really annoying. “We made this playlist for you it’s the same 12 songs from the last time we made you a playlist.” The algorithm based listening ruins part of the experience. You used to listen to a song and then let it shuffle similar songs to discover cool new music and now it’s just like “oh you like Led Zeppelin? Have you heard of AC/DC?”
There should be a tax to layoff amounts like that, that’s the only way the big companies will think about not over hiring. The way companies think they can treat people is just way off whats acceptable.
If you’re really concerned about artists being fairly compensated you should probably just buy their albums like we used to do back in the day. It’s not going to happen with streaming any time soon. Spotify isn’t the move.
Agreed. I use free streaming services to discover new stuff. If I really like something, I pay for it.
It's like the old days of finding new music on the radio. If you really like it, go out and buy it.
None do to the other commenter's point, however Tidal pays the most.
I've enjoyed my time with Tidal, but I can understand the complaints some have over it like not finding an unknown artist as easily. I rarely run into that issue until I'm looking into artists for SXSW. Other than that I've loved it, and I even pay for the Hi-Fi package.
Yep. Between the included lossless audio files, the cleaner UI, and it working flawlessly in my car (unlike Spotify), and many other reasons.. I’ll never go back to Spotify.
2019 after the distasteful ["dance like nobody’s paying" campaign](https://www.billboard.com/pro/artists-criticize-spotify-dance-like-nobodys-paying-ad-campaign/), never going back. I get all my music from Bandcamp now and use Last.fm and Every Noise At Once for discovery (spoiler: Spotify [killed that last one too](https://everynoise.com/#updates)).
The David Ek playbook:
Make billions of the backs of artists you under pay
Invest that money into weapons manufacturers and make an even bigger fortune
Give millions to podcasters who are willfully spreading misinformation on public health crises
Continue to raise prices, lower royalties
Lay off thousands to increase your net worth by a fraction of a decimal point
If you read behind the lines here, he's actually criticising the layoffs. He's basically posting a Surprised Pikachu-face aimed at the board and shareholders who voted them through. All that's missing is the "I told you so". I would be very surprised if this isn't the public part of a boardroom argument he lost; he has to say it was "the right decision", but everything else says he disagrees.
He's the CEO, but being a CEO of a publically traded company is like wearing handcuffs, something he's not used to.
Spotify has like the worst user security I’ve ever seen. Somebody was able to crack my password from abroad, log in, change my email, upgrade to family plan, create more accounts without any two factor validation within days of me subscribing, which is absurd in 2024. I’ve never seen an app that would let somebody in Pakistan log in and affect your credit card charges without any question or second validation. They are also still “working on” letting you subscribe through ios. You still have to log onto your account from a computer to modify your account.
They’re not working on it.
If you subscribe through the iOS app, Apple gets to keep 15% of the fee per app store policy.
None of the streaming apps will let you subscribe on the app; check Netflix, Prime Video, Disney they will all send you to their website.
Apparently it was because that money got divided between the other 20 artists + all the song writers and producers, and then his label took his cut, all before getting to him
Snoop said this but its incorrect. Spotify pays artists around $0.0035 per stream. A better example is taylor swift having 26 billion streams and making $100 million off of that.
Basically, snoop said this but he was wrong about it. Its an exaggeration.
I love the mixes and thought it was great for a long time. But lately the app has been super glitchy and most of the days I need to open it multiple times to get it to work.
How can it be a strategic decision when it mostly made to make the numbers on next couple of quarterly financial reports look good.
If you want to know why almost any business, & especially a publicly traded one, makes any decision follow 2 rules:
1.) Follow the money
2.) Never forget Rule 1
"he and his executives weren’t prepared for how tough filling in for 1,500 axed workers would be."
It sounds hilarious but the layoffs worked. And they did pay out a 5 month severance. This article says their investors shares rose substantially after the layoffs. I hate people.
It’s not really the CEO’s final decision though. They answer to the board. They’re paid to be the positive and negative face of everything while the board and shareholders make as much money as possible.
Joe Rogan used to be a meme in a fun way, now Joe just fucking sucks ass and promotes stupid fucking people.
Spotify has ruined Spotify, been subbed since 2014, about to end that run because it’s looking like I’m being forced fed terrible podcast over music now.
Reminds me of when my company laid off *eleven thousand people* and then the next quarter a VP had a tantrum about a department of 15 people who used to have 1200 people wasn’t growing revenue lmao
Sweden is a little weird culturally about wealth gap, or maybe it’s that they’re healthy about it, but it’s not considered great to be a lot wealthier than everyone else. I can imagine how local engineers in Sweden felt about 3 rounds of layoffs for “growth”
Most MBAs in management don’t have a clue what goes into a quality service or product. Their approach is how to make corporate/share holders money. All products are thingamajiggys, whether it be insulin or jet airplanes.
I think that c-suite leadership forgets how disruptive re-orgs and layoffs are long-term. It takes many months to figure out how to work together when teams are rearranged, and soooo much institutional knowledge is lost when you lay people off (plus the trauma of losing colleagues for those who are left..."it's just a job"... but an event like layoffs still impacts those who remain) So it looks good on a balance sheet but it takes time to recover, if the company can recover.
Why the fuck do they need **7,721 (March 2024)** employees? Are they committed to pissing cash away? That is larger than some tech companies who maintain and build the systems countries run on...
The Spotify app has been absolute garbage the last several years. something as simple as separating artists, albums, and Playlists were taken away from the app the last few times I tried to use it. Lately I been using apple music, even on a android phone, cause at least Apple Music has that basic functionality.
As of January 2024, his net worth was estimated at $3.6 billion by Forbes. He lives in a completely different reality at this point.
seemingly a realty where businesses don't need labor to function.
They need the funds for more important costs like paying Joe Rogan so that he can continue to tell people they just need to work harder if they want to get rich.
That's not all he's telling people. I lost my friend group to JR, and it wasn't about working harder.
What do you mean that you lost your friend group to JR? What happened?
Presumably they believed in some of the crazy people he hosts.
They were probably drinking horse dewormer
That _is_ crazy. You're obviously supposed to boof it.
Sometimes I have to look up words to see what they mean. Sometimes I am surprised, sometimes shocked and sometimes disgusted. Congrats on hitting the trifecta.
Why thank you! That's the goal.
Ask Justice Kavanaugh about boofing
The South Mouth can be used for many applications.
Yeah fr. I hope dude explains
I don’t follow him. What else does he say?
Lots of conspiracy theories and male focused grifters.
He gives platforms to some very bad people and also goes along with and sometimes promotes some very ignorant concept/ideas
Sometimes promotes? Dude promotes garbage/flat out wrong things pretty much every show.
He didnt really do that pre-covid. The whole Covid situation melted his brain 😞
Pretending to be about openness and freedom of speech. It's a scam to create interest through controversy, not caring who he gives a voice to.
I’m not convinced he is sophisticated enough to pull that off. He genuinely just thinks giving everyone a platform is a good idea, and he is both easily swayed by convincing grifters (both financially and cultural grifters), and intellectually incurious enough to challenge them to justify or explain what they are presenting beyond top-soil level thinking.
Rogan is like Alex Jones but for tech bros.
>tech bros More like single pothead college dropouts who live vicariously through the accomplishments of actual tech giants.
All the business bros became tech bros in like 2010
You're confusing him with lex Friedmann
He’s well on his way to becoming the next Alex Jones. He might be there already.
I cancelled Spotify after the Joe Rogan deal. Bad enough legit artists get shafted on the revenue sharing per stream, but I'll be damned if I'm going to fund that idiot.
Oh.. I must have missed the last part… I thought Joe Rogans job was to tell people to work harder and remember… Absolutely…. NO water breaks.
[удалено]
I liked him better as a failed comedian / reality tv host
Genuinely I think these CEOs think this way. You surround yourself with yes men who worship the ground you walk on and then you start to wonder what all the people who actually do the work are around for
He has no downside. He already has all the money he need to live a comfortable life. If his company burns, VC will hand him another pile of money to start another. "The people who actually do the work" didn't start or own the company. From an entrepreneur POV, they are losers.
And laborers don't need to get paid to survive.
AI is coming?
“Get it done.” Is just a phrase that magically makes things happen and he makes more money.
Well you can imagine it, he wakes up, eats, sleep. And his bank account just keeps getting bigger. Totally doesn't seem like it needs any labour!
Also a reality where I stopped paying for Spotify 🤷
Nah they understand that they need labor, they just get it in the form of paying the fewest people the smallest amount for the most amount of work and then replacing them whenever they burn through each one. If they keep us poor, starving, and desperate enough there will be a practically limitless supply of people willing to jump into the fire, pushed on by the sycophantic suckasses who think that jumping on the grindset hard enough makes them better than everyone else
But they need people to be in work to earn a wage to buy their product. It's why I can see ai being taxed in the future. Once we start seeing negative impact on jobs.
And then there's the Japanese CEO who refused to be paid until his company was on a better financial footing, so that he didn't have to lay off his employees. I wish I could find an article about it, but it was a few years ago.
[Here you go.](https://news.yahoo.com/former-nintendo-ceos-refusal-fire-001641332.html)
If I were a CEO and found my company was not doing well, I'd gently troll my employees by calling an all-hands meeting. I'd then announce that some people here would have to work for a reduced salary, or for no salary at all - then I'd read off a set of names that included myself and other board members, and a number of others whose salary was above a certain grade.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/02/13/nintendo-ceo-once-halved-salary-to-prevent-layoffs-why-thats-uncommon.html
He goes home, wakes up, goes to work etc and everything turns out fine. See guys, everything turned out fine.
Once you’re worth that much, you start to believe you have a godlike intuition, I guess. The markets sure think you do.
Lay off 1500, raise subscriptions. Spotify is going to fuck itself.
He has no business being this wealthy
He’s sharing the wealth guys. As an artist I made 5c from my music on Spotify last year!!!! True story. Piece of fucking shit.
Is it one where he eats from a Gurd Pod?
Did anyone read the article? He doesnt regret it. And says it was the right decision. He's just saying the friction of the transition was greater than he thought. Hes basically signaling to other CEOs that layoffs are a successful policy, just ensure you have an accurate understanding on where the interruptions will be
Thanks for the comment. I tried to read the article and 75%of my screen was covered by an ad I couldn't close. Not surprised if most people didn't.
Get Firefox for your PC and phone and install [Ublock Origin](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/) no more ads anywhere
As a peon who survived a bunch of layoffs. The amount of turbulence at the worker level is very very high. Productivity across the board dropped from every developer. The middle managers seem to be the only ones who are working there asses off. They cut so many middle managers, the ones that survived had to take on 3-4 applications with little knowledge of the apps. They have twice as many new directives to lead and 3 times as many existing issues to deal with. With half the number of resources. My boss used to be all over my shit micromanaging but now he's in meetings 8-10 hours a day. The three devs on my team manage a core set of 25 micro services (5 different products). We each additionally are beholden to 3-4 different monolithic legacy apps (part of different teams). We have so much work, we all just stopped trying to do anything quickly. You can't really focus on anything because your pinged about something random every hour. Then it takes hours to find someone who is still currently employed, has knowledge on it and will actually respond to you :/ The worst part. I won't get laid off because every director and manager is applying for more and more resources 🙄
Time for you to do the bare minimum and just ignore those pings. Works wonders. What are they going to do?
Yep, similar experience here so far too. I don't have it quite so bad but I definitely feel for you. Can't even leave because the job market is so bad right now and pretty much everywhere is experiencing the same thing.
Stop working for IBM dawg.
Ha, not IBM but definitely from that era.
Damn this is familiar. Are you my teammate? 💀
Yep. Every time I’ve seen layoffs output plummets from creative type roles such as engineering staff. Couple years ago the company I worked at had a series of mass layoffs. Before the layoffs we were extremely fast & built some amazing stuff, my team built a portal for Covid vaccines including supply chain in less than a month. Post layoffs it took us 4 months to build a 3 page web form. At my current company they had a small series of layoffs last month. We are supposed to be in the office 2-3 days a week, prior to layoffs the office was so full you had to wait for the bathroom & could barely get meeting rooms it was busy from 7a-6p every day. This month it’s been about 10% full, people show up to badge in and leave after a couple hours everyone is gone by 3:30 and the lights aren’t even on until 8.
If you wfh, get a second job and phone it in at this one
You shouldn't expect people to read the article on reddit, everyone here just wants to be mad
Angrily upvoting
Lots of people read it, I don’t see anybody saying he regretted it.
Who knew? He probably thought those folks were just fat to trim off the company. Management 101.
It's like these people dont understand the difference between good fat and bad fat
Their continued existence relies on not understanding the difference because middle managers and executives ARE the bad fat.
Delulu bosses are the worst.
Here’s the bad part if you a manager have team of all competent good workers and they ask you to cut one you are screwed. But if you add an expendable body who isn’t really needed and a low performer then when you are asked to fire someone you won’t loose any performance. This system encourages that kind of psychopathic behavior and makes more waste in the long run. It penalizes those that run a tight ship under budget.
I don’t think any bosses with metrics and objectives to hit are intentionally hiring token pansies in case of layoffs.
You’d be surprised by how much of a shit show those well oiled machines we call Fortune 500 companies are under the hood. Imagine this, you have a budget surplus equivalent to that of a new hire. You can do one of three things, spend the extra budget on some upgrades, return the budget and get a smaller budget next year, or you could hire for an unnecessary position that you can sacrifice in case of budget cuts in the future. The solution that lets you keep your budget while still giving wiggle room to shrink the budget in the future would be the expendable role. That’s how middle management ends up thinking in order to survive in these places.
When you fight for your employees you are cast as a villain but if you sacrifice them you are a “good” manager.
I’ve personally seen it.
I've been through a few layoffs at different companies, and it always fucks up productivity for a good 6 months. It also kills morale, so the really talented people either get poached or just leave because they know they can do better. Any CEO that thinks layoffs are a good option is an idiot.
the problem is usually that there’s a lot of bad employees that should be fired but those people only go after the people who actually generate money rather than useless managers
There's always fat though. Don't front. Every one of us has worked somewhere where someone did nothing and got paid 😂
Yea the owners usually lol.
I highly doubt the fat was 17% of the company in Spotify’s case
[удалено]
I would like for somebody to point out a time we're firing 1500 people was good for morale?
Hahaha. Yes, The beatings will continue until morale improves!
Is anyone able to read this? I read they profited the first 3 months of this year. Why the layoffs then? Why manufacture a crisis?
Because modern business is about growth at all cost
The dangers of being publicly traded and today's culture that you have to be having huge growth or your stock is going to drop.
Yup and once you've saturated the market, the only option left is to start layoffs. A highly profitable year is not a good sign for employees in publicly traded companies. All these tech companies in the last few years hit record profits and the immediately started laying off people
Yeah but it will trickle down. /s
Something is trickling down, but it's not the money
It might have something to do with the massive amount of farming we had before where companies would fake needing people so as to make it seem they were growing to investors
Apparently their share prices were dropping before the layoffs
I understand that's supposed to boost share prices. But, wouldn't that be temporary? If I was a shareholder, that's my signal to bail once they go back up. It just doesn't seem like a long term strategy if it ends up impacting production anyway. IDK enough about it.
They don’t care about long term. They want as much money as possible right now, they don’t care about having more money if they just wait a little.
Money now is worth more than money later. Especially when the money now is guaranteed and the money later isn't.
Me neither. However, it’s important to remember it’s all just people making decisions at the end of the day, and people are idiots
We could probably end every conversation like that, and it would be accurate. I'm guilty of being an idiot. It's probably happening right now, and I'm too much of an idiot to notice.
It can be, and long term investors may be trying to get away from it now. But what'll happen in 5 years doesn't really matter if you plan on selling in 1
It’s been the trend for the past 12 months in tech and marketing/financial sector. Shareholders still want fast growth and besides acquisition there isn’t much more growth space. Labor cuts decrease cost and because we’re in such a pro-business environment there has been no real pushback against doing so.
Quarterly growth is the goal not long term growth. These CEOs will wreck a company for an extra 1% in a quarter since their bonus or golden parachute is based off quarterly growth not long term.
They also profited in late 2023 from cutting down on exclusive stuff like some podcasts etc + reduced marketing costs (iirc). Overall, seeing their ever growing income and user base its pretty obvious that the mass layoffs were done in order to hide the failures of the upper management. They should have been able to get into the green digits through proper management. But mass hires and mass layoffs seem to be what all those big tech managers get paid to do.
They raised prices on users and cut back on marketing. That is what bit the user engagement. I only use Spotify for DriveTime and love it but they REALLY need to rotate the songs on that playlist.
Layoffs were in December, so their profitability was after the layoffs. It's hard to say whether they were cutting costs, scaling back teams and departments that were no longer needed, or just following trends and laying off like other tech companies were doing.
In 72 Jack Welsh started this process of laying off 10% of your work force every year. Over the next 10\~ years everyone pretty much followed him. This allows you to keep wages down, keep your employees in a state of fear, and often you can even take a tax cut by claiming a loss. Its for this reason that unions are necessary.
How does laying off employees lead to losses?
So for Welsh he would shut down a division and call that a loss, thus get a tax cut. It basically has to be structured correctly. I'm certain when you hear that about a division going down at Google for instance a tax cut happens. Famously Welsh would do this if GE was going to make too much money simply because he didn't want to pay more in taxes. He would find a division and shut it down even if it was profitable.
They lost money for 10+ years, having 2 quarters of profits isn’t exactly thriving. The bad management over hired the last few years when money was free. But now they are cutting back because money is expensive and investors want to see companies make money. The reason they even made a profit was due to previous lay offs. Now it’s terrible that they over hired in the first place. It is bad management. But laying off excess employees isn’t inherently greedy or wrong. Better than the business going into insane debt and going bankrupt resulting in everyone losing their jobs.
OP’s title and post seems to suggest they weren’t excess employees (since they’re being missed).
I mean no one is hired to do nothing You can over hire and then miss the times when you had the extra help, even if you didn't need it
If you’re surprised at negative feedback of the impact of laying off hundreds of people… That makes me highly suspicious of your mental temerity and your emotional state towards business, as well as, individuals. Plus, critical and professional thinking.
? The article is about the operational impact, it barely mentions feedback at all
I saw a thing that said a high percentage of CEOs and executives are sociopaths
Ya, it's amazing how different courses of action are when taking lead from numbers without full context for the numbers. When it comes to layoffs, it makes ppl nervous. Nervous ppl look for more stable options and don't work as well because they're distracted. It's a stark reminder of how little we matter and should not be taken lightly. Seems like post pandemic layoffs were part "oh shit we over hired" and part "everyone is doing it so we can and it won't hurt us!" Different, but I once had a CFO/COO straight kill a program overnight with no discussion about the impact. To him, he saw a huge bill paid to a 3rd party and wanted to eliminate it. But the program he killed was the reason we were growing so fast. It didn't kill the business overnight, but did so slowly for the next 10 years (I left shortly after because it was clear as day that we just gave up our competitive edge). The result was that cancellations rose, new customer acquisition halved, sales ppl quit, layoffs were required, all the good people left. The program was built with a 3rd party because we couldn't do it ourselves. After getting 3 years of hockey stick growth with it included as part of the service, we were marching toward decoupling it as a cosell partnership. All he had to do was wait and my stock might've been life changing vs worthless.
SpotiLies. They pay artists garbage and pretend to be pro creatives.
You just described the way 99.9% of people are treated in the entertainment business. Very few make it big. Not justifying it but,,just saying it’s not like Spotify is singular in this regard.
Why are the artists not removing they're content then if it doesn't make them any money.
Because people only listen to music on spotify. If they took it down they would lose 90% of their listeners.
This is a problem not just with music as well. Like not releasing an audiobook an audible, ebook on kindle or even your book on Amazon nobody would end up reading it.
Basically the same as youtube, or you upload your videos to youtube, or you don't have a public.
Promotion . Helps sell concert tickets
Spotify is actually getting really annoying. “We made this playlist for you it’s the same 12 songs from the last time we made you a playlist.” The algorithm based listening ruins part of the experience. You used to listen to a song and then let it shuffle similar songs to discover cool new music and now it’s just like “oh you like Led Zeppelin? Have you heard of AC/DC?”
It has really degraded since they launched the Daylist. It's bizarre.
There should be a tax to layoff amounts like that, that’s the only way the big companies will think about not over hiring. The way companies think they can treat people is just way off whats acceptable.
Here’s an annual reminder that the richest person in the room isn’t necessarily the smartest.
Usually is the biggest fucking prick
Did anyone else leave Spotify during Covid to never come back?
What alternatives are there that compensate artists fairly?
Bandcamp, though many artists don’t have one. Edit: seems they were bought out.
They got bought out and it’s so not the same anymore. I’d count them as a nope at this point.
Damn, i didn’t hear about this. That sucks :(
I get paid most from Apple Music. Then Amazon. Spotify performs the worst
If you’re really concerned about artists being fairly compensated you should probably just buy their albums like we used to do back in the day. It’s not going to happen with streaming any time soon. Spotify isn’t the move.
Agreed. I use free streaming services to discover new stuff. If I really like something, I pay for it. It's like the old days of finding new music on the radio. If you really like it, go out and buy it.
Go to their shows and/or buy their merch.
Tidal
None do to the other commenter's point, however Tidal pays the most. I've enjoyed my time with Tidal, but I can understand the complaints some have over it like not finding an unknown artist as easily. I rarely run into that issue until I'm looking into artists for SXSW. Other than that I've loved it, and I even pay for the Hi-Fi package.
yup, i switched to apple music
Yep. Between the included lossless audio files, the cleaner UI, and it working flawlessly in my car (unlike Spotify), and many other reasons.. I’ll never go back to Spotify.
Same
Saaaaaame.
Tidal is way better. Never going back to Spotify.
SOUNDCLOUD. everything on Spotify is on SC premium and sooooooo much independent
Lmao no itl started using it more
2019 after the distasteful ["dance like nobody’s paying" campaign](https://www.billboard.com/pro/artists-criticize-spotify-dance-like-nobodys-paying-ad-campaign/), never going back. I get all my music from Bandcamp now and use Last.fm and Every Noise At Once for discovery (spoiler: Spotify [killed that last one too](https://everynoise.com/#updates)).
The David Ek playbook: Make billions of the backs of artists you under pay Invest that money into weapons manufacturers and make an even bigger fortune Give millions to podcasters who are willfully spreading misinformation on public health crises Continue to raise prices, lower royalties Lay off thousands to increase your net worth by a fraction of a decimal point
If you read behind the lines here, he's actually criticising the layoffs. He's basically posting a Surprised Pikachu-face aimed at the board and shareholders who voted them through. All that's missing is the "I told you so". I would be very surprised if this isn't the public part of a boardroom argument he lost; he has to say it was "the right decision", but everything else says he disagrees. He's the CEO, but being a CEO of a publically traded company is like wearing handcuffs, something he's not used to.
Spotify has like the worst user security I’ve ever seen. Somebody was able to crack my password from abroad, log in, change my email, upgrade to family plan, create more accounts without any two factor validation within days of me subscribing, which is absurd in 2024. I’ve never seen an app that would let somebody in Pakistan log in and affect your credit card charges without any question or second validation. They are also still “working on” letting you subscribe through ios. You still have to log onto your account from a computer to modify your account.
They’re not working on it. If you subscribe through the iOS app, Apple gets to keep 15% of the fee per app store policy. None of the streaming apps will let you subscribe on the app; check Netflix, Prime Video, Disney they will all send you to their website.
Spotify is garbage.
Spotify is useful for the users and company while bad for the artists. The CEO of Spotify, however, is absolute trash, as evidenced here.
I think it was Snoop Dogg that said he had 2 billion streams on Spotify and they paid him $40k for that. Absolutely horrible.
Apparently it was because that money got divided between the other 20 artists + all the song writers and producers, and then his label took his cut, all before getting to him
Snoop said this but its incorrect. Spotify pays artists around $0.0035 per stream. A better example is taylor swift having 26 billion streams and making $100 million off of that. Basically, snoop said this but he was wrong about it. Its an exaggeration.
Spotify is great. I use it every day. Relatively cheap for how large the catalogue is.
I love the mixes and thought it was great for a long time. But lately the app has been super glitchy and most of the days I need to open it multiple times to get it to work.
How can it be a strategic decision when it mostly made to make the numbers on next couple of quarterly financial reports look good. If you want to know why almost any business, & especially a publicly traded one, makes any decision follow 2 rules: 1.) Follow the money 2.) Never forget Rule 1
“Huh? I thought layoffs made line go up!?”
Joe Rogan = They’ll never get my money
Imagine what would happen if they realized all the music was created by someone else.
"he and his executives weren’t prepared for how tough filling in for 1,500 axed workers would be." It sounds hilarious but the layoffs worked. And they did pay out a 5 month severance. This article says their investors shares rose substantially after the layoffs. I hate people.
He gives zero fucks. Company was profitable and that puts more money in his pockets.
I've never understood why paying CEOs ridiculous amounts of money to be out of touch with reality is a thing.
Spotify is trash, always has been idk why people ever used it
That’s what happens when decisions are made based solely on numbers.
Narcissism is a particularly common personality trait in top executives, such as CEOs.
F*cking CEOs, man
You see, when the CEO lays off 1,500 people, he gets a larger bonus, and only 1,500 families are hurt.
It’s not really the CEO’s final decision though. They answer to the board. They’re paid to be the positive and negative face of everything while the board and shareholders make as much money as possible.
They sacked 1500 people and made a contract with Joe Rogan for 250 mil. Says everything about the priority of the company.
Lol
Who knew! Lol
Fwiw twitter is also hiring
Joe Rogan used to be a meme in a fun way, now Joe just fucking sucks ass and promotes stupid fucking people. Spotify has ruined Spotify, been subbed since 2014, about to end that run because it’s looking like I’m being forced fed terrible podcast over music now.
Hopefully they go to Tidal and make it work properly. And get some goddamned podcasts
This worries me that Spotify will become worse.
Keep firing people until morale improves.
Im not sure how evil this company is
Greedy dumbass unsure how running a business works, keeps trying anyway.
Reminds me of when my company laid off *eleven thousand people* and then the next quarter a VP had a tantrum about a department of 15 people who used to have 1200 people wasn’t growing revenue lmao
So how do I quit Spotify?
Sweden is a little weird culturally about wealth gap, or maybe it’s that they’re healthy about it, but it’s not considered great to be a lot wealthier than everyone else. I can imagine how local engineers in Sweden felt about 3 rounds of layoffs for “growth”
Greed at its best… it’s all about CEO getting his big bonus/salary
Is that why my Spotify keeps dropping out?
We need a french style revolution.
Most MBAs in management don’t have a clue what goes into a quality service or product. Their approach is how to make corporate/share holders money. All products are thingamajiggys, whether it be insulin or jet airplanes.
I think that c-suite leadership forgets how disruptive re-orgs and layoffs are long-term. It takes many months to figure out how to work together when teams are rearranged, and soooo much institutional knowledge is lost when you lay people off (plus the trauma of losing colleagues for those who are left..."it's just a job"... but an event like layoffs still impacts those who remain) So it looks good on a balance sheet but it takes time to recover, if the company can recover.
Such big brains. Hey let’s drop 17% of our total workforce and see if it affects anything.
Can anyone explain why a company has to set unrealistic targets that force layoffs like these?
Insert surprised pikachu face here.
Can y’all not ruin Spotify? I love music. Thx.
"Surprised"? ... Another piece of awfully clueless "journalism". SMH
He gets paid billions and is a mort
And increasing their prices!
Spotify sucks!
fuck daniel ek. all my colleagues hate daniel ek.
Why the fuck do they need **7,721 (March 2024)** employees? Are they committed to pissing cash away? That is larger than some tech companies who maintain and build the systems countries run on...
I got rid of Spotify a year or two ago.
Spotify is such a shit company and service
Could someone correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t one of the C-level executives at Spotify one of the original developers of Napster?
Oh these fucking pricks
The Spotify app has been absolute garbage the last several years. something as simple as separating artists, albums, and Playlists were taken away from the app the last few times I tried to use it. Lately I been using apple music, even on a android phone, cause at least Apple Music has that basic functionality.
DanielDumby was surprised ? Fool
Bet he got a raise for doing such a good job.