What's stopping them from bigger cuts? We've seen that big SW products can run on lean teams(whatsapp, post-Musk Twitter) and we know many large tech companies are overloaded with way more workers than they need to run(Google), just because they could overhire when money was free.

>Apple and Amazon will eventually eat Spotify given enough time, if they don't find a moat to be built

What prevents Google from doing the same? They already have a large customer base in Android users.

But Google could easily do a Google and sabotage the product at some point.

Who knows what Google’s music play will be next year? Not Google. Media is second only to Messaging for their lack of a consistent long term strategy.

The inefficiency of Google always amazes me.

So you know, the standard Google experience.

At this point, consumers should know that "for life price" is a scam to get gullible customers through the door and gain market share or collect user data. Just like with a Ponzi scheme, consumers should realize by now why such pricing is not sustainable long term due to inflation and other costs, and either the business will crash or they'll have to inevitably backtrack on that promise and raise prices to stay afloat. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

No excusing Google of this scam, but they only did what every other company with these kind of hollow promises did.

I vividly remember Cerberus on Android was selling one time licenses for life, only for them to backtrack on that years later and switch everyone to their subscription instead, publishing a letter along the lines of "sorry, we know it sucks, but the lifetime licenses we sold you are unsustainable financially for us, so we'll switch you to subscription UwU."

Same with Google's unlimited Photo storage.

I'm sure when they migrated users to YouTube Music they got rid of the special deal.

As long as they have the cheat code for unlimited free money(ads) they can be as inefficient as they want.

It's the kind of people they attract. IBM types...

Spotify is actually trying to make money. If the goal of running Spotify was to get everyone to listen to the CEO's crappy garage band, maybe then it would be a valid comparison.

However, after that experience, I'm starting to think there's no way in hell a massive multi-product conglomerate like Apple/Amazon is going to overtake a single-product music streamer like Spotify.

Apple/Amazon are clearly stretched too thin, and in a worse strategic position on audio due to the way the licensing agreements shook out. In music, everybody basically has access to the same catalog on every platform.

And given that songs are 4 minutes long (vs 4 hours binging TV shows), you spend wayyy more time interacting with the software in audio vs. video. So in audio, it's purely just deciding which UI/features you like best.

Spotify seems to be trying its best to screw up the UI, but no way it ever gets as bad as Apple Music given that's their only meal ticket.

When you offer a single service and the benefit is being device agnostic, "cutting costs" by wasting time hiring people you probably didn't need to hire only to fire them a year or two later means an amplified disruption that will lose customers.

But hey, board members who jerk each other off once a month in a conference call who are already rich made a little more money by hiring a bunch of people only to fire them later and at a huge operational waste.

This is how our world works and it's bs.

Amazon Music Unlimited is very neat experience compared to Spotify... Good catalogue (for me), better music quality and it's app is just plain, boring music player not something neurotic like Spotify...

They can also just keep being the most complete music streaming service.

That is a low margin business, but it’s a business, and you probably don’t need a lot of people to run it.

I don't think you know what you're talking about...

PS. Spotify had already two layoffs, once 6% in Jan 2023 and 2% in June. This combined seems like a 25% ish cut.

- Use is only up when measuring metrics like "we hit our peak user-seconds" which only measures short term usage spikes and not longer time-scale sustaining metrics.

- Lack of diversity of users, instability of ads performance, and a CEO making antisemitic and anti-Palestinian claims has led to advertisers pausing Twitter ads at a high rate. Valuation has dropped to $10s of Billions instead of $44B.

- Small bugs never get fixed (on Firefox mobile if I accidentally hit the "Views" button on a tweet, the pop-up modal is inescapable and breaks my back button and tab state, so I have to open Twitter in a new tab.

Can't cut costs to profitability if you are cutting revenue faster than costs.

I doubt it.

Apple is restricted to Apple devices. As for Amazon, the same argument could be made about Prime Video eating Netflix, and that never seemed to happen.

On top of that, as far as I know, Spotify is profitable.

I still wouldn't use it, but I am surprised that I never knew of this.

So pretty much everywhere.