News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Spotify will reduce total headcount by 17% across the company. Parent comment

Re:Spotify will reduce total headcount by 17% across the com... by FirmwareBurner on Monday December 04, 2023 @02:44AM (#38514662)
>They need a bigger cut. 17% will not have a big enough impact to its bottom line.

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Spotify will reduce total headcount by 17% across the com... by fooker on Monday December 04, 2023 @02:53AM (#38514730)
For anything other than American and maybe European music, YouTube Music is so much better nowadays wrt availability. YouTube Music has stellar quality of recommendations too.

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

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Spotify will reduce total headcount by 17% across the com... by macrolime on Monday December 04, 2023 @03:12AM (#38514861)
YouTube Music still only has a tiny fraction of the music available on YouTube.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Spotify will reduce total headcount by 17% across the com... by fooker on Monday December 04, 2023 @10:56AM (#38518820)
Everything in YouTube comes up when searched from YouTube Music.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Spotify will reduce total headcount by 17% across the com... by wlesieutre on Monday December 04, 2023 @02:52AM (#38514722)
Google Play Music, YouTube Music, YouTube Music Premium, YouTube Red, now YouTube Premium.

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Spotify will reduce total headcount by 17% across the com... by csunbird on Monday December 04, 2023 @02:47AM (#38514690)
Google themselves? Given the popularity of the YouTube they should have won a decade ago, but they have not.

The inefficiency of Google always amazes me.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Spotify will reduce total headcount by 17% across the com... by kevinmchugh on Monday December 04, 2023 @02:58AM (#38514773)
About a decade ago they had Google Music. A friend of mine really liked it. He was supposed to have a for-life price of $7/month (or something) and then they raised prices and failed to grandfather his price in. Being Google, there was no way for him to complain about this to them, so he cancelled and used a product he liked less, out of spite. At some point they launched a duplicative product, YouTube Music, which they later migrated all customers to.

So you know, the standard Google experience.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Spotify will reduce total headcount by 17% across the com... by FirmwareBurner on Monday December 04, 2023 @03:57AM (#38515111)
>He was supposed to have a for-life price of $7/month

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Spotify will reduce total headcount by 17% across the com... by kevinmchugh on Monday December 04, 2023 @04:44AM (#38515402)
My recollection is that others retained that price, it was a bug or oversight that caused him specifically to have the price increased.

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

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Spotify will reduce total headcount by 17% across the com... by htrp on Monday December 04, 2023 @09:02AM (#38517306)
It's almost always for the lifetime of the product?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Spotify will reduce total headcount by 17% across the com... by FirmwareBurner on Monday December 04, 2023 @02:51AM (#38514717)
>The inefficiency of Google always amazes me.

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

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Spotify will reduce total headcount by 17% across the com... by chewz on Monday December 04, 2023 @02:50AM (#38514712)
> The inefficiency of Google always amazes me.

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

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Spotify will reduce total headcount by 17% across the com... by nova22033 on Monday December 04, 2023 @12:18PM (#38520029)
post-Musk Twitter

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]