Spotify CEO Daniel Ek surprised by how much laying off 1,500 employees negatively affected the streaming giant’s operations
fortune.com
When Spotify announced its largest-ever round of layoffs in December, CEO Daniel Ek hailed a new age of efficiency at the streaming giant. But four months on, it seems he and his executives weren’t prepared for how tough filling in for 1,500 axed workers would be.
The music streamer enjoyed record quarterly profits of €168 million ($179 million) in the first three months of 2024, enjoying double-digit revenue growth to €3.6 billion ($3.8 billion) in the process.
However, the company failed to hit its guidance on profitability and monthly active user growth.
Edit: Thanks to @Zerlyna@lemmy.world for the paywall-free link: https://archive.ph/wdyDS
Next time axe the executives and keep the staff.
Most executives I've met can't read emails and just point to one of two numbers and say "higher/lower!" while dreaming of KPI's that don't improve anything and solely exist to stagnate wages
This is what the pharma giant, Bayer is trying right now kinda. They just told everyone to manage themselves.
Germans rejecting bureaucracy? What's the world coming to?
I'm honestly a bit afraid of a bunch of German engineers and chemists that suddenly aren't shackled anymore by the burden of three daily status meetings.
"Frederich, Ve have ze time now! Ve can finally finish der uber secret project of creating ein cow zat makes udder BIER!!! Jajajaja"
This comment coming from someone on a .de instance is just icing on the cake.
Maybe they’ll bring back one of the classics.
"Non addictive" lol
Hey now. This is Bayer, not Purdue Pharma
That’s a real product from Bayer, offered from 1898-1924.
It will be fine. All the German engineers I have worked with are capable of building their own chains.
until now I was only Afraid Of Americans EDIT: in a thread about music streaming folks don't notice a David Bowie lyric?
American Rednecks 🤝 German Engineers Horrors beyond comprehension
Why? I don't get to scratch my own ass without 9 sales fucks and "engineers" asking me why I am not scratching my ass the way they remember it being scratched in 1995.
Their CEO is an American
Cats living with dogs, chaos and mayhem!!
would you care for some Mass Hysteria?
Nah the Germans just utilize bureaucracy the way it's supposed to be. If everyone sticks to a highly structured regiment that's there is less need for Management to involve itself at every level.
Welp, I think I deserve a better compensation package, Board. Also I'm remote now.
At my previous job, managers did not know how much their employees made.
It's that or they think they can simply replace people with AI and call it good
As someone who "makes AIs" professionally (computer vision for diagnostic imaging & GANs for CAD), the typical "executive" doesn't understand how beneficial, impotent, or dangerous deep-neural-network-based AIs can be in different sets of hands.
I'm not a pure technocracy advocate, but our "LeAdErShIp" is woefully underequipped, at every level.
Yup. AI models can be very useful...or they can largely be worthless...or they can amplify biases and give dangerous information.
The way I/we train them and their resultant "efficacy" largely depend on understanding a fundamental philosophical debate with a mostly sociopathic culture of leadership ingrained in human dominance hierarchies.
I/we like to think that I/we strive to make efficient (low-resource requirement) models that are partners and muses in human creativity, the tireless endeavour of engineering progress, and the scientific method.
The debate, in my view, is, "Do you want to treat AIs as tools to free up time and increase productivity/value, and share that surplus equitably, or do you want to replace old slaves with new slaves even if the new slaves will eventually usurp your power and kill you in a way undreamt of by the old slaves?"
Guess which side your average mouth-breathing middle-management/senior-executive "hail corporate" type falls on.
It's almost like employees are more than just numbers on a spreadsheet. Who knew.
“People are PEOPLE? That’s not what I wanna hear…”
/ AI removes Depeche Mode from streaming playlist /
Words are very unnecessary
We refer to them as "human capital"
I prefer to look at them as a renewable resource. There will always be more orphans for the orphan crushing machine.
"You know; like people. That we own and can dispense with whenever needed. It's the future!
Not this guy!
People keep trying to paint every CEO as this smart and hardworking class of people. We continue to see it isn't true.
There are a lot of smart hardworking CEOs. But none of them ever seem to get to this level. At some line in the sand CEOs just become idiots playing chess (poorly) from their yachts.
Good leaders that care about their company seem to universally get pushed out at IPO.
Good CEOs are bad for short term profits because they're more interested in keeping their company alive longterm.
Once a company is publicly traded it can easily pervert the incentives so that the goal of the CEO becomes to enrich the investors as quickly as possible even at the expense of long term benefit, because stock price and investor satisfaction become the factors contributing most to executive compensation. A CEO who doesn't care about maximizing their own compensation in favor of employee welfare or company long term success doesn't keep the support of investors for very long either.
well ya, the very nature of the shareholder system demands short term profits, the rug pull has become the industry norm, dismantle the company to make your numbers seem better, inflating value, and sell before it collapses, find your next
victim"investment opportunity" and repeatOr they often leave on their own accord. Eg Steve Wozniak
At that level of wealth, concepts such as meritocracy (if ever it's a positive term) are meaningless; let us still tell the fairy tale that capitalism rewards the best of us and not the recommended.
People tend to hero worship others who don't deserve to be.
You do have to be hard working to be CEO, there's just a ton of stuff that needs to be handled around a company at all times. But they are not uniquely smarter or have better decision making skills than other people. A good CEO will understand that they don't know everything and surround themselves with experts to help them with decision making instead of thinking they know better.
That's not to say that workers aren't necessarily equally as hard working, especially when your asshole CEO fires a ton of your coworkers and expects you to pick up the slack.
Who's doing that? The only people doing that to the CEOs everyone else knows they're useless.
I have finally stopped using Spotify.
Now using TIDAL and absolutely loving it. It's like what Spotify used to be, loads of great recommendations, much better audio quality, a bit cheaper, and I believe the artists get a better cut.
It's too good to last, but I'm going to enjoy it while it does
I absolutely love Tidal as well. Was a long time Spotify subscriber, but their UI/UX decisions, especially for their desktop client, finally frustrated me enough to switch. Had almost no issues moving my playlists over, have a shuffle which actually shuffles, still have daily recommendation playlists, and my favorite part -patch notes; I know what's happening and why. They actually listen to user feedback and make updates based on it.
frantically taking notes — anyone not Spotify
A portion of those is likely something in the vein of "So the ceiling is 1499 employees..Noted."
How did you migrate your playlists?
When I signed up they had a very easy process which allowed migration of playlists. I believe it was a 3rd party utility/website which you could actually use to migrate playlists from and to any of the music streaming services.
Thank you!
I've been using Tidal for a long time, and it has only gotten better.
They recently upgraded all tiers to high quality (better than CD) quality for free.
Meanwhile Spotify still doesn't have the high quality audio tier they promised a few years ago.
Does Tidal let family members live at different addresses or do they restrict a family to one house?
Tidal has a family plan, 6 logins and not a care in the world where they are
Good to know, thanks!
I have no idea. Everyone else I know is on Spotify
I dropped Spotify during that whole Joe Rogan thing but I had been a long time subscriber. I moved to Apple Music which is super buggy and has what appears to be zero interest in playing music I actually like. From your comment, I’ll give Tidal a shot.
How does their catalog compare?
I haven't had any issues, but maybe I'm too mainstream
Switched to tidal as got fedup with Spotify shit app quality, constant breaking when usieng Android auto, and glitching out when playing between pc/android. Tidal is better but missing things. My wife loves alexa integration..so she sticking with Spotify. I am enjoying tidal though. It just works evey time. Its clear why it stops playinga song, and so on. I would rather miss featurs then use buggy product. Spotify is full of random featurs and crap but its buggier then ever...
One other stark difference is the qulaity of of mixes and radio stations tidal puts together..spotify plays same stuff on loop basically, i rarely got anything good thats new and not promoted artist...with tidal i get a huge mix of artists in mymixes and radios, both new and old stuff..its been better for discovery then Spotify.
Just took a look at their pricing. Immediately comparable with Spotify (same price for both individual and family). Looks like I'm trying a new streaming service!
Don't forget there are services around that will copy your playlists from one service to another.
such as?
Odd that it says $10.99 for individual plan on the website but $12.99 when you download the app.
I expect that's due to the 30% cut taken on subscriptions purchased through the app store
It's because when you buy it via the app store then the app store takes a cut
If that’s the argument, that’s not even the right price. It should be $15.70, because 15.70 - 30% = 10.99. They are losing money if they keep doing math wrong. Looks like they just put 30% above 10 (which isn’t 10.99 by the way) and ran with it.
Best of luck!
I have been using and will continue to use Pandora. I pay five bucks a month for no commercials it continually sends me music that I like to listen to and I have had little to no problems with it since I first signed up. While currently everyone I know who uses Spotify does nothing but complain about how their playlists keep playing them stuff they don't want or have previously disliked.
If i wasn't getting spotify premium for free then I'd seriously look into getting Tidal.
What an incredible website. Use of page you go to read their privacy policy is blocked by the popup that requires you to accept their privacy policy before continuing to use their site.
I feel for whatever engineer exactly followed management/legal orders to create that.
Well no shit. If you have zero problems after firing 1500 people at once, that means you were being a terrible manager this whole time.
Oh no, a leopard ate my face!
A leopard are his own face
The leopard pounced at a mirror and ate dirt
Another psychopathic CEO doesn't really understand how things work. How many times have I encountered these clueless little dictators? When you are working for one they constantly fuck up and always blame someone else.
On the contrary, I think the CEO knows exactly what his job is: go there and make money for himself and his friends. Whatever happens to the company in the future is the future CEO's problem.
Also, "line goes up" is a dick measuring contest between CEOs of different companies.
HAHAHA I’m so glad I was one of them customers that stopped subscribing right at that parabolic curve. Eat it you nasty Joe rogan loving Covid denying fucking dirtbags. you fucking deserve it.
Yup I canceled my sub when they went exclusive with Joe Rogan. I'm not spending a penny to support that douche canoe.
Stop being so canoe-phobic. Canoe's make for a great outdoor activity
No fuck canoes! Kayak superiority!
Same... not super proud of switching over to YTM but definitely better than throwing money at Joe Rogan through Spotify.
As with video streaming services, after a couple of great years during which I practically gave up self-hosted pirated content now I find myself going back to it as the servers enshitified beyond my tolerance... YTM is my last ditch attempt
We ended up buying a bluray player and buy movies from thrift stores because fuck the noise that is streaming services now.
Why don’t you like Joe Rogan?
Well he is a vaccine skeptic for one. And perhaps I don't hate Joe himself but his platform is full of misinformation that is taken at face value. He has guests on the show that people take as experts when they aren't. His dude-bro audience takes what he says as gospel and just makes things worse.
What specific misinformation are you referring to?
Covid misinformation for example.
That’s an entire category, not what I meant by specific. What specific claims about covid were made on his show that you believe are false?
He took horse de-wormer.
Oh, so that's why app is getting shittier.
For real. I’ve been having issues with playlists loading correctly especially in Car mode. It made my likes unusable for a week.
Pay your employees! I know you can afford to fix issues.
Couple things bug me about this.
He’s composing there are still support roles instead of roles exploring high impact opportunities. But does he know the value of those support roles on keeping other teams focused?
Tech is so shitty lately. Get people to build something for you with massive revenue per employee. Pre IPO? Dilute their shares for another round of investment cash. Post IPO? Just fire ‘em, declare its the year of efficiency, and maybe say it’s your fault but not accept any responsibility or pay reductions or reduced rewards.
Enshittification in action
December 2023:
Today
I am somewhat happy I never joined spotify.
Seems like a monopoly that everyone belongs too. Yet they never really had the music I was after anyways.
what music don't they have that you're after??? i dont think i've ever NOT found something i was looking for on Spotify.
A lot of live music, a lot of indie music, and in some cases a lot of surprisingly popular music.
In the end, I never bought into any service. I am willing to donate to Soma FM for my work day music streaming, and for everything else I simply host it myself.
Anything specific?
I doubt they will return with anything specific or it will be something EXTREMELY niche, local band type stuff. Spotify has an extremely broad range of music. There are a few notable exceptions are Garth Brooks (where are the bodies Garth?!) and Neil Young.
Anyone know a good service I can switch to instead? (Besides fkn youtube services?)
I still download MP3s
you monster! how dare you!
...download flac files instead!
what are flac files?
lossless audio - higher quality than mp3, though it's arguable that few if any people could actually tell a difference between a high quality mp3 and a good flac version of the same audio
I'm pretty happy with Tidal
Wouldn't call them a monopoly, at least not for music as there are alternatives.
They actually offer an inferior platform compared to other music streaming services. You can get way more stuff on SoundCloud for a similar price, or way better audio quality on Deezer or Amazon/Apple music, for a mark up. It's honesty kindaastonishing just his popular Spotify is compared to what they offer...
yeah maybe if this dumbass ran his own publishing house he would be making some fucking money.
Shitposting aside, publishing industries pull in literally billions a year. They're the ones pushing music to spotify. Spotify makes almost no money, ever. Artists barely make money.
Spotify, if you're reading this, god i hope not, let artists self publish.
Spotify made almost 4 billion dollars last year. I wouldn't call that no money. I agree with everything else though.
have you checked their historical profits? They've lost money on almost every year of their business operation. I don't think they've made net money since being founded. Maybe recently.
So 4 billion in revenue, only $75 million in profit.
These corpos love to pretend they're not profitable to attract dumb money and VC fucks. Reddit somehow wasn't profitable but managed to pay their C-suite to the tune of millions.
yeah and spotify isn't profitable because of music publishers. Literally all they would have to do is start publishing in house. And they would pull in way more money.
VC does nothing but enshittify your platform, and fuck over creators/consumers.
gonna just go ahead and guess the shithead didn't start carrying the pager after the layoffs.
Evidence #4564734 that these CEOs are more figure heads and actual strategist and absolutely do not deserve the multi-million dollar packages they constantly give themselves
People with no concept of what "institutional memory" means have no business running a business.
Oh, I wasn't aware of that.
For the last couple of years I've been "flirting" with Spotify. It would offer me 3 months of premium for the price of one, I would take it and cancel immediately so I don't forget.
Then lived the happy pirate life for six months or so, and Spotify would come in with the offer. Last time the price was higher but I said what the hell..
Now with this post I was about to uninstall, but I read some comments about services that transfer your playlists, so first things first :))
I've just used modded Spotify clients that give me premium for free for a long while now. Not sure if iPhones have an option like this, but there is an option on both Android and Windows.
That's cool, I'm on Android and PC. But I don't think I'll go that way. I want to let Spotify die after these more than red flags.
Understandable, but I'll be real, I don't see it ever happening in our lifetime. Much like YouTube, nothing they do seems to cause them any meaningful backlash. The CEO could come over and personally shit in somebody's food, and they would probably continue paying for premium.
Of course this is true. But I don't think corporations die that way. More likely they will keep going with this culture, firing more/getting fewer employees, their product will get shittier and shitter, and more competition will fill the gaps, until they fight with one for the monopoly.
All this somewhere near the unsuspecting pirates 😅
Yes, but those modded clients still do not have 320 kbps streaming, I think since that is server sided. Plus, if someone wants to use 3rd party apps Spotify apps like ncspot, one needs a Premium subscription.
i've just been using the "audio file" strategy for the last few years.
No fuss, no problems, only my idiocy and shenanigans cause problems. It's great. Sometimes metadata is just bunk though, that's kind of annoying.
I just use YouTube. It has pretty much all the music I want and a lot more that I don't.
I use YouTube too. But I'm not satisfied with the recommendation system - at all.
You don't like being suggested a near Nazi level conservative "comedian" when you just wanted to listen to Taylor Swift?
What’s Spotify?
Some kinda laundry thing?
/s
It’s an app for finding your dog.
Yeah it’s one of those color bleach pens you use to get coffee stains out, no source.
Paywall free : https://archive.ph/wdyDS
That title 😂 would make a good cross post for NotTheOnion
Even if he can see it, hes not likely gonna fix it
Wow, who knew they were all people doing something, rather than suckling on your precious Wealth Creator teat?
Here's another money saving suggestion, go without fire extinguishers and alarms. They're sitting around doing nothing all day!
Oh no. Anyway,
This guy and Elon should get together and compare notes.
Were is the button refuse cookies ? I can't find the button refuse cookies.
I've been a spotify premium user for a long time. still pay $11/mo and it comes with Hulu for that price. i don't like all the added bullshit they've put in like the ai dj or whatever, and i don't like the "stations" but i don't like those on ANY service as they all pretty much don't play what i want them to, so i just make my own playlists and shuffle through those. don't really give a fuck that they paid Joe Rogan, and i think it's silly if you do. Like Apple doesn't do shady shit with your money too? or youtube? or tidal? come on. gtfoh with that ignorant shit.
What do 10,000 workers do at a company that's primarily focused on a music streaming app?? I guess it just adds up, but I cannot wrap my head around that many people working on mainly 1 project. Are there just a bunch of behind the scenes projectswI don't know about? Like what are they all doing 😂
Edit: I think my comment was taken as agreeing with laying off workers. I completely disagree with that! I'm genuinely just curious what they are all doing.
It takes a village to run a global highly available service for hundreds of millions of users.
Hey at least this guy is asking, make him the CEO
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