Remember Spotify has approx. the same number of premium subscribers as Netflix has subscribers, so it's not exactly tiny.
In the Age of AI, even before 2023 and ChatGPT, localization is a very automatable+contractor heavy job that is very easy to complete. All of africa might need 3-4 teams of 20 people total, and that's including sales/marketing. Maybe double for South America.
The reason tech companies have expanded so much is it looks better when an 8000 employee company controls the worlds music than when an 800 person company does. Same with Google, Facebook, AirBnB, Netflix, etc. The tech monopolies want to make they monopolies seem less ridiculous to regulators.
No.
Over-hiring is probably the same everywhere. When "times are good", everyone in the organisation wants to hire because their number of subordinates makes them seem more important and accomplished.
Localisation isn’t just about language - consider payment requirements, legal and regulatory specific challenges, pricing strategy, regional licensing, there might be specific features required to support low bandwidth (eg carrier agreements), if you want to ad-support like Spotify you will need a team to sell ads… it’s hardly a chatgpt + few contractors job.
The Spotify most people know (finding and playing songs, creating playlists, recommendations), which obviously very important, is probably a tiny fraction of the complexity for the company.
I would wager the vast majority of the employees at Spotify are working on everything else needed to enable the above. The artists portal, analytics and royalties, paying the labels, paying the artists, legal for every country, etc.
Someone who knows could probably elaborate more than me on everything needed to run a company like that.
Does that require 8000 people? Debatable, but it's certainly more complex than clicking a song and playing it.
EDIT: A quick glimpse at job listing for Spotify on LinkedIn shows:
* Client Partner in India
* Business Operations in Nigeria
* Creator Partner Manager in Mexico
* Artist & Partnerships Manager in Egypt
* NLP Research Scientist in the USA
* Director of Sales in Singapore