From the article:

Spotify reported that it had 9,400 employees at the end of the third quarter of 2023. It had already cut back employee numbers by 6% in January and by a further 2% in June.

> Spotify reported that it had 9,400 employees at the end of the third quarter of 2023. It had already cut back employee numbers by 6% in January and by a further 2% in June.

I'm also curious what they need 10k people for. What of the business is so labor-intensive?

Every Spotify wrapped is put together by hand

I had a good chuckle at this

I'd guess managing labels, podcasters, marketing & ads + moderation takes a huge chunk there.

the constant interface overhauls they do, probably

I would like to say "curating the library" but it's probably license paperwork and negotiations with the rightsholders.

Probably those require a lot of local branch offices for legal reasons, so that's a lot of HR/admin overhead.

I wonder what they were all doing. Their special apps, like the iWatch, are below par and they are pretty much the last service that doesn't offer HQ audio. AI does most of the editorial playlist generation. What are nearly 10K people doing?

Probably just a fraction of employees are doing software, the bulk of the work is managing contracts, labels, legal compliance in 250 countries, marketing, administration, etc.

Reminds of the quote attributed to Naval Ravikant (paraphrased):

You have one person running the website. They leave and, of course, you need two people to replace that one person. Then, eventually, one of them leaves, you need two people to replace them etc. This brings you to a scenario where you have 5,000 people maintaining the website and changes take years.

Product sprints aren't going to run themselves

yea seriosuly.. they're desktop app is electron. its not like their individual apps are getting special attention.

imho, I'd pay extra for a good NATIVE spotify client for the mac

> they're desktop app is electron

AFAIK, it's not actually Electron, but their own tooling using Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). Also AFAIK, they came up with their solution for this before Electron was even a thing (so before Atom the code editor, which Electron came from).

No you wouldn't