Technology

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.

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

profit has been tasted, now unfettered greed takes over

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.

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.

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

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…

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

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

Short term profit

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.

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.

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.

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