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.
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gonna just go ahead and guess the shithead didn’t start carrying the pager after the layoffs.
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
It’s that or they think they can simply replace people with AI and call it good
As someone who “makes AIs”, they don’t understand how beneficial, impotent, and dangerous deep-neural-network-based can be in different sets of hands.
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.
This is what the pharma giant, Bayer is trying right now kinda. They just told everyone to manage themselves.
They just told everyone to manage themselves.
Welp, I think I deserve a better compensation package, Board. Also I’m remote now.
Germans rejecting bureaucracy? What’s the world coming to?
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.
Their CEO is an American
Cats living with dogs, chaos and mayhem!!
would you care for some Mass Hysteria?
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It will be fine. All the German engineers I have worked with are capable of building their own chains.
Maybe they’ll bring back one of the classics.
Hey now. This is Bayer, not Purdue Pharma
That’s a real product from Bayer, offered from 1898-1924.
“Non addictive” lol
“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.
I’m honestly a bit afraid of a bunch of German engineers
until now I was only Afraid Of Americans
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.
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 doesOdd 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
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 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
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.
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
I have no idea. Everyone else I know is on 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?
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.
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.
How does their catalog compare?
Both are way smaller than Slsk’s.
Slsk /Winamp for life. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
Hello friend
I haven’t had any issues, but maybe I’m too mainstream
I saw Spotify sent out an email for another fee hike yesterday. When I opened the app, it was showing me some garbage for an AI playlist generator and the email mentioned they needed more money to pay for amazing new features, the new AI system was no better than the previous system so I figured wtf do they need it for.
After 15 years of being a paid member, I’m going to wrap it up and go back to piracy.
I’m on the same track although I distribute my music there, so I wonder if unsubbing will affect that. I’m not subbed to the other platforms that have my music, so I don’t see why it would.
Because they have a huge market share, though, it’s easier to tell people check me out on Spotify than Tidal/Deezer/Bandcamp or whatever because the average Joe doesn’t know what those are.
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.
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 😂
It takes a village to run a global highly available service for hundreds of millions of users.
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!
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!
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.
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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.
Spotify’s revenues for 2023 grew 16% year over year, reaching 3.67 billion euros ($4.05 billion), as a surge in both monthly active users (up 23% to 602 million) and premium subscribers (up 15% to 236 million) beat expectations.
After a third quarter in which the streaming company turned a profit for the first time in a year, however, its operating loss was again in the red, at 75 million euros ($82.7 million), albeit better than its guidance; Spotify says that excluding one-time charges its operating profit would have been 68 million euros ($75 million), more than double the 32 million euros ($34 million) in profit it generated in the third quarter of 2023.
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.
Paywall free : https://archive.ph/wdyDS
What a stupid fucking cunt.
Having watched tens of thousands lose their jobs at Amazon…yes, a lot of shit falls apart when you remove roles that were previously doing stuff. On top of this, survivors guilt, and the fear of more layoffs basically kills productivity. If you don’t understand this as a CEO, you should be first in line for the billionaire guillotine.
Even if he can see it, hes not likely gonna fix it
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.
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 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?
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’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.
People with no concept of what “institutional memory” means have no business running a business.
This guy and Elon should get together and compare notes.
