Spotify to lay off 17% of workforce
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Huh. Hmm, let's see...shareholder profits, exec salaries, employee wages, artist payouts. Where should they cut costs first?
Staff and artists, definitely. The obvious choice.
Staff and artists, definitely. The obvious choice.
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The CEO has sold and profited by hundreds of millions of dollars selling stock. The CEO is full of shit.
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Maybe I'm just jaded, but I read this as another announcement from yet another company that while the employees are all doing their part and the company is experiencing more positive growth than ever... Management screwed up, over spent on negative ROI pet projects, wasted $$$ on executive bonuses and perks, and now they need to lay off workers to adjust for their poor management choices. That and to keep saying they reduced costs by X% year over year.... Forever....
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From the context, “relentlessly resourceful” clearly means individuals taking on the jobs of more than a couple people. Funny how layoffs often don’t result in a decrease in the volume of work people are forced to do for the same pay… It’s definitely more “efficient” to be doing the same amount of work with fewer people, I suppose.
Edit: typo
And: $25M for Harry and Meghan?? Wtf?
Edit: typo
And: $25M for Harry and Meghan?? Wtf?
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Well we gotta find that hundred million for Joe Rogan to “just ask questions” about vaccines from somewhere, right?
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Any company where the CEO, an individual person, makes 9 figures a year, should be legally prohibited from laying off a single person who makes less than 7 figures a year.
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PatientZero
Ars Centurion
How much did Joe Rogan get? 100 million? 200 million? For a host that just goes "wow" and "far out" every few minutes while a guest talks?
Great deal, there. Really good CEO-ing.
Great deal, there. Really good CEO-ing.
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That's not being jaded, that's understanding how business works. The folks doing the jobs on the ground are at the mercy of the direction of the management who have to not suck when making decisions.
Unfortunately the average upper-level manager is terrible at making long term decisions - and given that the ones that don't get their jobs via nepotism or their ability to suck up are still bound by the Peter Principle this isn't actually surprising. So eventually reversion to the mean means that decision makers are, on average, going to be bad at estimating what projects will succeed or what staffing needs to look like or any number of other things that impact the health of the company.
If the average upper manager was actually decent at that kind of work then I wouldn't be so angry at the outsized salaries they get. But they aren't - when companies are successful it's generally despite their decision making due to luck or a good overall market.
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Yeah, but they can’t get that money back. They’ve blown a lot of money trying to grow, that silly Joe Rogan deal and the high profile Meghan Markle deal is only the tip of the iceberg. They spent all that money because they thought it would make them into a much bigger company that could support all those employees.
Figuring out that you should just be a smaller company that does basic music streaming well is a hard pill to swallow once you’ve thrown good money after bad.
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This is because most of the are incentivized to put short term gains over long term stability - you know for shareholder value and the illusion of infinite growth
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Surprised it took this long since everyone else has been doing it, too. I'm also really, really starting to hate the term "activist investor"; while it is technically a neutral term and you can campaign for any number of causes, it's almost always "waaa make me more moneyyyyyy."
I'm also constantly surprised at how many employees these tech companies have, because I really don't see why it takes 9,000 people to run a music streaming service. I'm super ignorant in that regard so it's not an admonishment, I'm just curious what they all do there.
I'm also constantly surprised at how many employees these tech companies have, because I really don't see why it takes 9,000 people to run a music streaming service. I'm super ignorant in that regard so it's not an admonishment, I'm just curious what they all do there.
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Ugh, that's commienism talk.
How can you attract high-value CEOs who will run businesses into the ground for short-term gain if the pay gap isn't 1000:1 and they can't fire all the people doing real work? Utter poppycock!
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As someone who works in tech (and was laid off from a PM role at Google this year) watching the industry collapse has been… disheartening… when it comes to career prospects.
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It's too bad nobody warned them at the time, and there are no examples of other companies making similar mistakes that they could have learned from.
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Dr_EluSivE
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
Support the artists and BUY their music. Renting music month to month supports bad companies, not the artists you enjoy.
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I'd make that "taken all that Venture Capital money and now find yourself stuck and unable to keep the promises you made to investors".
All of Spotify's growth came because their investors wanted them to grow. That was why they were throwing money at Spotify.
If Spotify was going to be a smaller company that does basic music streaming and made a steady profit, nobody would have invested in it. The stock had to be going to the moon to get the literally billions of dollars in investment capital that Spotify as acquired over its existence.
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The end goal always seems to be to reduce the workforce to ZERO while retailing the profits for the CEO and his family and rich friends.
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I'll support them in many, many ways...but it won't be collecting plastic discs and vinyl records that I never use.
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Hey, someone has to reset the episode listing for long running podcasts every few seconds so I have to scroll all the fucking way down again because the only way to have episodes play in chronological order is to sort the oldest-to-newest from the beginning of fucking time!
I'm ok, really...
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I see the biggest problem with this entire mentality is the expectation of growth. If profits are going to grow year over year, and revenues have reached their peaks due to saturation, the only thing left is hurting people and reducing value. And that sums up just about every industry out there these days.
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I imagine a lot of it is sales and marketing, middle management, G&A to support them, and cloud engineering.
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Unfortunately, artists' share of royalties still tends to be pennies on the dollar even for a purchase.
But yeah, that's still a whole lot more than they get from streaming.
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After Spotify decided to enrich Joe Rogan I decided to no longer enrich them. It's worked out well for both of us.
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I moved to a service that offers high quality audio after many years of subscribing to Spotify. Perhaps they should innovate there...
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ColdWetDog
Ars Legatus Legionis
But that appears to be done by a couple of interns in the basement. They aren't paying for that, are they?
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I assume you meant for individual people. But that might actually make sense for something like spotify to buy the back catalogues of artists, so they stop having to pay out the royalties and can charge others for the privilege of paying the music. Seems like a better investment than their waste of money on podcasts.
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This will become increasingly more common as the era of free money comes to an end and the do nothing CEOs desperately try to return to the years of 30% annual stock price growth. It will never happen. Liquidity will continue to drain from the markets as the fed continues QT and these CEOs will find they have to actually start making intelligent decisions on capital investment that matter long term when the quick fix layoffs run their course and they find there’s no one left to fire. Expect a larger a larger number of mismanaged companies to go bankrupt, and the extinction of the tech unicorns that once IPOd for billions of dollars without ever turning a profit. Theres little the average worker can do except sit back and watch the fire approach, and pray it passes over them. The CEOs will be the last to get the memo and feel the flames and by then they will have largely jumped to an early retirement with the cushy exit packages they secured when anyone could sign a blank check knowing the money to cover it would always be free.
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If that’s the case, and it most likely is, I’m not sure what the problem is. A bunch of people, including the programmers and line engineers who would otherwise never have been hired, all got paid money by a bunch of tech bro VC funds. That money should probably have gone some place more useful, but I don’t feel bad for the VC fund investors.
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