When Spotify announced its largest-ever round of layoffs in December, CEO Daniel Ek hailed a new age of efficiency at the streaming giant. But four months on, it seems he and his executives weren’t prepared for how tough filling in for 1,500 axed workers would be.
The music streamer enjoyed record quarterly profits of €168 million ($179 million) in the first three months of 2024, enjoying double-digit revenue growth to €3.6 billion ($3.8 billion) in the process.
However, the company failed to hit its guidance on profitability and monthly active user growth.
Edit: Thanks to @Zerlyna@lemmy.world for the paywall-free link: https://archive.ph/wdyDS
This guy and Elon should get together and compare notes.
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Ctrl-W
gonna just go ahead and guess the shithead didn’t start carrying the pager after the layoffs.
What’s Spotify?
Some kinda laundry thing?
/s
Yeah it’s one of those color bleach pens you use to get coffee stains out, no source.
It’s an app for finding your dog.
Next time axe the executives and keep the staff.
Most executives I’ve met can’t read emails and just point to one of two numbers and say “higher/lower!” while dreaming of KPI’s that don’t improve anything and solely exist to stagnate wages
This is what the pharma giant, Bayer is trying right now kinda. They just told everyone to manage themselves.
They just told everyone to manage themselves.
Welp, I think I deserve a better compensation package, Board. Also I’m remote now.
At my previous job, managers did not know how much their employees made.
Germans rejecting bureaucracy? What’s the world coming to?
Their CEO is an American
Cats living with dogs, chaos and mayhem!!
would you care for some Mass Hysteria?
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Maybe they’ll bring back one of the classics.
“Non addictive” lol
Hey now. This is Bayer, not Purdue Pharma
That’s a real product from Bayer, offered from 1898-1924.
This comment coming from someone on a .de instance is just icing on the cake.
“Frederich, Ve have ze time now! Ve can finally finish der uber secret project of creating ein cow zat makes udder BIER!!! Jajajaja”
I’m honestly a bit afraid of a bunch of German engineers
until now I was only Afraid Of Americans EDIT: in a thread about music streaming folks don’t notice a David Bowie lyric?
American Rednecks 🤝 German Engineers Horrors beyond comprehension
Why? I don’t get to scratch my own ass without 9 sales fucks and “engineers” asking me why I am not scratching my ass the way they remember it being scratched in 1995.
It will be fine. All the German engineers I have worked with are capable of building their own chains.
Nah the Germans just utilize bureaucracy the way it’s supposed to be. If everyone sticks to a highly structured regiment that’s there is less need for Management to involve itself at every level.
It’s that or they think they can simply replace people with AI and call it good
As someone who “makes AIs” professionally (computer vision for diagnostic imaging & GANs for CAD), the typical “executive” doesn’t understand how beneficial, impotent, or dangerous deep-neural-network-based AIs can be in different sets of hands.
I’m not a pure technocracy advocate, but our “LeAdErShIp” is woefully underequipped, at every level.
Yup. AI models can be very useful…or they can largely be worthless…or they can amplify biases and give dangerous information.
The way I/we train them and their resultant “efficacy” largely depend on understanding a fundamental philosophical debate with a mostly sociopathic culture of leadership ingrained in human dominance hierarchies.
I/we like to think that I/we strive to make efficient (low-resource requirement) models that are partners and muses in human creativity, the tireless endeavour of engineering progress, and the scientific method.
The debate, in my view, is, “Do you want to treat AIs as tools to free up time and increase productivity/value, and share that surplus equitably, or do you want to replace old slaves with new slaves even if the new slaves will eventually usurp your power and kill you in a way undreamt of by the old slaves?”
Guess which side your average mouth-breathing middle-management/senior-executive “hail corporate” type falls on.
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People with no concept of what “institutional memory” means have no business running a business.
People keep trying to paint every CEO as this smart and hardworking class of people. We continue to see it isn’t true.
At that level of wealth, concepts such as meritocracy (if ever it’s a positive term) are meaningless; let us still tell the fairy tale that capitalism rewards the best of us and not the recommended.
Who’s doing that? The only people doing that to the CEOs everyone else knows they’re useless.
There are a lot of smart hardworking CEOs. But none of them ever seem to get to this level. At some line in the sand CEOs just become idiots playing chess (poorly) from their yachts.
Good leaders that care about their company seem to universally get pushed out at IPO.
Good CEOs are bad for short term profits because they’re more interested in keeping their company alive longterm.
Once a company is publicly traded it can easily pervert the incentives so that the goal of the CEO becomes to enrich the investors as quickly as possible even at the expense of long term benefit, because stock price and investor satisfaction become the factors contributing most to executive compensation. A CEO who doesn’t care about maximizing their own compensation in favor of employee welfare or company long term success doesn’t keep the support of investors for very long either.
well ya, the very nature of the shareholder system demands short term profits, the rug pull has become the industry norm, dismantle the company to make your numbers seem better, inflating value, and sell before it collapses, find your next
victim“investment opportunity” and repeatOr they often leave on their own accord. Eg Steve Wozniak
People tend to hero worship others who don’t deserve to be.
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Daniel Ek founded the company. He got to where he’s at by having lots of money. He got that money to found Spotify by being hired into other companies which were acquired. You’re describing “Executive Vice Presidents” that were promoted from within.
You do have to be hard working to be CEO, there’s just a ton of stuff that needs to be handled around a company at all times. But they are not uniquely smarter or have better decision making skills than other people. A good CEO will understand that they don’t know everything and surround themselves with experts to help them with decision making instead of thinking they know better.
That’s not to say that workers aren’t necessarily equally as hard working, especially when your asshole CEO fires a ton of your coworkers and expects you to pick up the slack.
HAHAHA I’m so glad I was one of them customers that stopped subscribing right at that parabolic curve. Eat it you nasty Joe rogan loving Covid denying fucking dirtbags. you fucking deserve it.
Yup I canceled my sub when they went exclusive with Joe Rogan. I’m not spending a penny to support that douche canoe.
Stop being so canoe-phobic. Canoe’s make for a great outdoor activity
No fuck canoes! Kayak superiority!
Same… not super proud of switching over to YTM but definitely better than throwing money at Joe Rogan through Spotify.
As with video streaming services, after a couple of great years during which I practically gave up self-hosted pirated content now I find myself going back to it as the servers enshitified beyond my tolerance… YTM is my last ditch attempt
We ended up buying a bluray player and buy movies from thrift stores because fuck the noise that is streaming services now.
Why don’t you like Joe Rogan?
Well he is a vaccine skeptic for one. And perhaps I don’t hate Joe himself but his platform is full of misinformation that is taken at face value. He has guests on the show that people take as experts when they aren’t. His dude-bro audience takes what he says as gospel and just makes things worse.
What specific misinformation are you referring to?
Covid misinformation for example.
That’s an entire category, not what I meant by specific. What specific claims about covid were made on his show that you believe are false?
He took horse de-wormer.
Another psychopathic CEO doesn’t really understand how things work. How many times have I encountered these clueless little dictators? When you are working for one they constantly fuck up and always blame someone else.
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Also, “line goes up” is a dick measuring contest between CEOs of different companies.
Evidence #4564734 that these CEOs are more figure heads and actual strategist and absolutely do not deserve the multi-million dollar packages they constantly give themselves
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A leopard are his own face
The leopard pounced at a mirror and ate dirt
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Actually that’s a really good point. Apart from any glaring ethical concerns one might have about this kind of thing, it’s not a terribly good way to run a business. Man do these folk ever like finding a nice new way to shoot themselves in the foot 🤦♂️
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I’d give a new CEO a pass on this tbh
I wouldn’t. They should either be promoted from upper management and know better, or build their own company and know better. There’s no excuse to manage that many people without experience.
December 2023:
“Economic growth has slowed dramatically and capital has become more expensive. Spotify is not an exception to these realities,” Ek wrote in a letter to staff posted to the company’s website.
Today
The music streamer enjoyed record quarterly profits of €168 million ($179 million) in the first three months of 2024, enjoying double-digit revenue growth to €3.6 billion ($3.8 billion) in the process.
Oh, I wasn’t aware of that.
For the last couple of years I’ve been “flirting” with Spotify. It would offer me 3 months of premium for the price of one, I would take it and cancel immediately so I don’t forget.
Then lived the happy pirate life for six months or so, and Spotify would come in with the offer. Last time the price was higher but I said what the hell…
Now with this post I was about to uninstall, but I read some comments about services that transfer your playlists, so first things first :))
I’ve just used modded Spotify clients that give me premium for free for a long while now. Not sure if iPhones have an option like this, but there is an option on both Android and Windows.
Yes, but those modded clients still do not have 320 kbps streaming, I think since that is server sided. Plus, if someone wants to use 3rd party apps Spotify apps like ncspot, one needs a Premium subscription.
That’s cool, I’m on Android and PC. But I don’t think I’ll go that way. I want to let Spotify die after these more than red flags.
Understandable, but I’ll be real, I don’t see it ever happening in our lifetime. Much like YouTube, nothing they do seems to cause them any meaningful backlash. The CEO could come over and personally shit in somebody’s food, and they would probably continue paying for premium.
Of course this is true. But I don’t think corporations die that way. More likely they will keep going with this culture, firing more/getting fewer employees, their product will get shittier and shitter, and more competition will fill the gaps, until they fight with one for the monopoly.
All this somewhere near the unsuspecting pirates 😅
I just use YouTube. It has pretty much all the music I want and a lot more that I don’t.
I use YouTube too. But I’m not satisfied with the recommendation system - at all.
You don’t like being suggested a near Nazi level conservative “comedian” when you just wanted to listen to Taylor Swift?
i’ve just been using the “audio file” strategy for the last few years.
No fuss, no problems, only my idiocy and shenanigans cause problems. It’s great. Sometimes metadata is just bunk though, that’s kind of annoying.
