Spotify is shedding 6 % of workers
Spotify is shedding 6 % of its workforce as a part of a company-wide restructuring, CEO Daniel Ek wrote in a message to workers. The exact quantity of people that will lose their jobs wasn’t supplied, however the firm employs round 9,800 individuals, in keeping with its final earnings report. As well as, chief content material officer Daybreak Ostroff is stepping down as a part of the adjustments, Ek stated.
Very like Google’s Sundar Pichai, Ek stated he takes “full accountability for the strikes that acquired us right here right this moment.” The corporate will present 5 months of severance to workers on common, together with acrued and unused trip time, healthcare throughout the severance interval, immigration assist and profession assist. Nearly all of Spotify’s workers are based mostly within the US, adopted by Sweden and the UK.
The corporate is “basically altering how we function on the prime,” delegating its engineering and product work to the brand new chief product and chief enterprise officers, Ek stated. “These adjustments will permit me to get again to the half the place I do my finest work—spending extra time engaged on the way forward for Spotify.”
Like different tech corporations, Spotify has expanded quickly over the previous couple of years, notably within the space of podcasting. It spent over a billion {dollars} on podcast networks, internet hosting providers and reveals like The Joe Rogan Expertise. A lot of that effort was pushed by chief content material officer Daybreak Ostroff, who grew podcast content material by 40 instances, in keeping with Ek. As a part of the adjustments, nonetheless, she’ll be leaving the corporate.
Spotify joins different tech giants in making mass layoffs, partially because of a downturn within the economic system and partially because of hiring sprees. Over the previous few weeks, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Google laid off 51,000 workers mixed. From 2020 to 2022, nonetheless, these corporations hired many extra workers than they let go. Spotify itself had 6,617 workers in 2021 and 9,800 a yr later, previous to the layoffs.