3mums

According to LinkedIn, Spotify currently has 13,900 full-time employees, with 3620 in Engineering (26%), 1850 in Arts & Design (13%), 1000 in Media & Communications (7%), and roughly 800 each in Marketing, Business Development, and Sales (5-6% each).

Over the last 12 months, headcount has risen dramatically within Sales (+32%), Arts & Design (+19%), and Business Development (+21%). In comparison, Engineering has seen just a 2% rise, Media and Comms at 0%, and marketing at +10%.

If I had to guess, lots of these layoffs will begin to affect their headcounts within these functions that have experienced rapid year-on-year growth, and affect their Engineering function (despite being their largest) proportionally less than these other functions.

I would be interested in how you came to your conclusion of needing only 200 employees for a company of this scale? Any company of spotify's scale will have entire functions that will be distributed globally and working on a variety of projects or products. For example, Spotify has almost 400 data scientists. Off the top of my head, I can't fathom what I would have 400 data scientists working on, but I can easily believe that a company with over $12bn in revenue and 574 million listeners this year could find a use for them.