this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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[–] [email protected] 227 points 8 months ago (14 children)

They could easily pay those workers by terminating the contract with Rogan

[–] [email protected] 57 points 8 months ago (3 children)

I think Joe was out of things to say 10 years ago. You could replace him with AI and never know the difference.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 8 months ago (3 children)

I don't think AI speaks "knuckledragger" well enough

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[–] [email protected] 193 points 8 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago

profit has been tasted, now unfettered greed takes over

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[–] hunter2 90 points 8 months ago (6 children)

Anyone knows why Spotify needed 9000 employees in the first place?

[–] [email protected] 74 points 8 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 8 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago

Yeah, their smart random, or whatever they call it, is horrible. Thank God clicking it again removes the garbage it added to a playlist.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago

My buddy works there now, as the audiobook company he worked for got acquired by them.

You would be shocked how stupid and manual the content acquisition process is. Book publishers might as well still be operating back in the 90s, it's all phone calls and spreadsheets attached to the emails and manual FTP uploads.

If the music business is anything like the audiobook business they likely need so many non IT just to keep the machine fed with content.

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[–] [email protected] 61 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Oh, hey, look at that. I just axed Spotify to save myself money. Fuck Spotify.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 8 months ago (13 children)

I said, 'fuck it, why not?' when the whole joe rogan boycott happened. Have not missed Spotify one bit since.

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[–] [email protected] 58 points 8 months ago (5 children)

How do they have this many employees and an absolutely trash android app?

[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago (6 children)

A lot of these “auto-pilot” apps have thousands of people employed, I don’t get it. Like, what is there to work on once you have things working pretty well? If anything they just start ruining the product over time…

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

To be fair, even Apple Music and Tidal are trash on Android. And Apple is a $3 trillion company with over 150k employees.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It's both amazing and annoying that Google is perfectly able to create useful apps for iOS (despite the huge limitations the OS imposes) but Apple can't figure out how to make any Android app that isn't utter crap with fewer restrictions imposed on them.

@d3Xt3r
@hesusingthespiritbomb

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago (1 children)

They want you to buy Apple.

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[–] [email protected] 49 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 8 months ago

The first quarter they are profitable ever: AXE THEM!

[–] [email protected] 39 points 8 months ago (10 children)

Didn't they also slash how much they pay artists? What exactly is the point of Spotify?

[–] [email protected] 60 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The point is to make as much profit as possible without losing too many subscribers. This includes cutting expenses both internally and externally

[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Wow essentially like any other company

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It's not like they're firing 1500 to survive

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago

No it's min-maxing

[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Short term profit

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Not really, they set a "minimum threshold" of unique annual listeners to get a payout. If a song has at least 1000 unique listeners per year it gets the same payout it did before. If it gets 999 it gets zero.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 8 months ago

Yes, fire everybody. That's surely a fantastic long term plan to make that all-important line go up.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 8 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago (1 children)

As much as I dislike Rogan, he's hardly a fascist. He's just an idiot that agrees with anyone speaking confidently for more than 5 seconds.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Spotify's issue isn't unique. Fundamentally, given how much money the labels demand and how relatively low streaming subscription fees are, there's simply not a ton of money around. Spotify has been unprofitable for most of the past few years. The fact of the matter is that people expect to be able to listen to essentially all music for a relatively cheap price, and labels expect to get most of that money. The specifics of the company don't matter much. If Spotify dies, people will migrate to another platform, and the finances won't be meaningfully different there. Maybe someone like Apple could afford to eat the losses or is actually big enough to tell the labels to pound sand, but otherwise, this is just kinda what the situation is.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (4 children)

Sincere question: do you use a unique, secure password on your Spotify account, and are you sure that it's never been compromised? Your story sounds very similar to a case where a Spotify account was being used by someone else.

Reply All episode about it: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/j4he7lv

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago

And then Spotify will be €50 a month because costs.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago

This is all your fault, you goddamn white noise listeners!

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