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Spotify to axe 1,500 workers to save costs
(www.bbc.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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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.
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.
Yeah, their smart random, or whatever they call it, is horrible. Thank God clicking it again removes the garbage it added to a playlist.
I've had nothing but trouble with the Spotify app.
it's been draining battery like crazy for me recently. I'd listen to music for an hour in the morning, and in the afternoon it'd show up as the first or second position on battery stats with "10 hours in background". it would also take its sweet time to load a playlist that I've downloaded for offline use when I was in a poor reception area, I assume because of the playlist "enhancing" or "smart shuffle", even though I've had those disabled. I've decided to temporarily move over to Deezer until I use my subscription to rip my music library, and then go back to using a local music library as the lawd intended us to do.
Only reason I ever used it was because my ex had it at the time, after we broke up, I said good riddance.
And if you block the Facebook domains the app doesn't work.
OK, fuck you Spotify.
Each of those should be a team, not a 1k+ person department. A few tens of engineers for dev, the same for QA and DevOps, then maybe a few hundred employees for all the review processes, marketing, relationships with music labels&advertisers, etc.
Discord famously runs (ran) with 50-odd engineers. Silicon Valley's VC-backed economy is famously terrible with over-highering by orders of magnitude, and since interest rates went up some of those companies realized that maybe they should stop burning so much money.
You have to keep in mind that they operate all over the world. Each country has its own labels and messy negotiations to do. Doing literally anything on a global scale takes a lot of people, no matter what it is, just to navigate the differing business environments.
So we should expect their legalese and marketing departments to be the heaviest staffed then, right?
Mind, I'm not disagreeing with you, you make a very good point. Licensing is arcanely complex, and it's different for every country. Also makes sense to me that legal and marketing would be significantly impacted by all this.
Almost like you'd need a top level org for both legal and marketing (2 orgs) then sub organizations for each country/legal domain.
Seems like that could require quite a few people.
Edit: holy non-words, autoincorrect.
That's my point. But not "9000 people" many people. That's an ABSURD number, that's almost certainly more people than there are record labels with nonstandard/custom contracts with spotify...