Merry Christmas to all those families!
Yes, we had record profits but our CEO has the job of raising the share price so that investors can buy and sell higher, so we have to find more profits somewhere.
You understand.
I did notice that the CEO who decided to pay a single podcaster 200 million dollars never got laid off. Same guy whose big expensive bet on several other exclusive podcast deals failed spectacularly.
Well yeah, how else is he going to be able to afford his 9th yacht? Come on, be reasonable now.
Classic that once wrapped is out to everyone they fire a huge amount of there workforce just a few weeks before Christmas. Shows why the streaming model is a sham.
I know the sentiment that you are conveying, and I understand each of the words in your comment individually, but I honestly have no idea what you’re saying here.
I think Wrapped is like youtube rewind for spotify.They are talking about how the layoffs happened just after they finished working on that?
Though I think it is less the streaming model being a scam and more the way Spotify is taking all the profit and avoiding to properly pay out smaller creators.
It doesn’t seem to me like Wrapped requires a terribly large amount of development work every year. There’s a new design each year, but they probably just reuse all the SQL queries with the year swapped out. After the first year, it probably only requires bugfixing and regular maintenance. I bet a few devs keep an eye on it as part of their other duties.
Unlike YouTube Rewind, which requires a writing team, a production crew, talent, and music, on top of the analytics.
This is how I understood the comment:
Wrapped gets Spotify a lot of positive buzz. Layoffs while that buzz happens may get less notice, because people are on the “look at all the neat Spotify numbers” train and essentially advertising good vibes for the platform.
Ah! You may be right. That would make a lot of sense.
Spotify made this quarter the first time a profit since it existence. So if you think artists aren’t paid enough, its either of these three:
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We pay too little for consuming music.
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The record labels take a too big share.
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Spotify is really inefficient and could pay out more if they work more efficiently.
The only thing not possible is Spotify taking all the profit since they don’t make any.
Very true. There’s another possibility, though: That pay for certain employees (ie executives) is too high. It may not be included in 3, if the pay is normal. However, that “normal” may be considered immoral, and/or straight market failure,
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Spotify take a standard cut?
It’s record labels that are scamming small artists, and frankly spotify offer a better chance for them to go independent than having to rely on connections to get radio play so someone will buy their music
Wohh there, that’s a lot of claims with 0 proof.
Can yo source any of that?
https://dittomusic.com/en/blog/how-much-does-spotify-pay-per-stream/
They charge 30%
Which is what Apple charges (and Spotify complain), and what Steam charges, and what GoG charges, and what Epic charges, and what Google Play charge, and what the company I work for charges
For a digital media marketplace, 30% has been settled on for the industry standard whether it’s reasonable or not.
Okay? And physical stores don’t? This isn’t news and doesn’t address your claim whatsoever? It doesn’t compare spotify vs indi labels.
Discoverability, publishing, advertising, gigs etc.
30 percent of what? How much is each stream making? You know why I ask? Because I have been independently releasing music for almost 4 years and have made $26. On top of that I’ve surpassed 1000 streams, so what is the 30% exactly?
The kicker: that $26 is not only Spotify, it’s Apple Music, Deezer, and dozens others, combined.
So the only reasonable take is, that we don’t pay enough for consuming music, right? Because you have no label taking a cut and streaming services are not profitable themselves.
According to my spotify wrapped I listened to about 2500 different artists. Yearly subscription is 143,88€, so if spotify took 30% and ther rest is split equally to every artist they’d get a nice 0,0578€ from me each. For your $26 that’d mean on similar math that you’d need ~450 listeners, so it’s atleast nearby the ballpark if you have 1000 streams on there.
I obviously omitted things like VAT and other taxes, payment processor fees and complexity of revenue streams in general, like how long I listened to each to keep it simple.
I’m not saying if that’s fair or not, I just did quick and rough math around the data I had easily available. All I know is that for that half a cent per artist I’m not providing anything to anyone but I receive quite a lot every day.
For more detailed info you can check spotifys own report.
Looking at your Spotify page you will be an artist who gets nothing in this new plan. You have 14 average monthly listeners right now - each song needs 1000 unique listeners per year to get any sort of payout.
30% of the subscription price. That small artists get screwed over is entirely due to labels.
After the service cut has been taken, all money is put in one big pool and them divided by total number of streams and sent to the labels. How the cut between labels and artists is divided is up to individual contracts between artists and labels but usually the majority goes to the labels due to still accounting for cost of producing and shipping physical CDs. Pooling all users money also unfavourably favours big artists and is enforced by the labels as bigger artists makes them more money than smaller ones.
You can’t just put your music on Spotify unfortunately. Google Play Music had the option to pay a small one-time fee to get your music up there, but they did away with that when they moved to YouTube Music.
If you’re unsigned you need to go through a service like TuneCore to get your music on any of the streaming services.
Someone said Spotify reported 54 million in profit. For being the largest music streaming provider that is basically nothing. I suspect that they mirror the rest of the world, in that there’s enough money, but they decide to give the vast majority to people who are already rich, like Joe Rogan or Taylor Swift.
This is how I understood the comment:
Wrapped gets Spotify a lot of positive buzz. Layoffs while that buzz happens may get less notice, because people are on the “look at all the neat Spotify numbers” train and essentially advertising good vibes for the platform.
Something that I don’t quite understand about Spotify is why they had the amount of employees that they did in the first place. What were 9000 people doing for work on a music playing and recommendation website. I know they used to be highly innovative and disruptive a long time ago, but has that been the case in recent years? How were 9k people contributing to this already established web music app?
I don’t know how many in that 9000 are actual developers, but you also have to take into account the non-technical corporate employees (accounting, legal, marketing, support, curators, HR, etc.). They also have offices in different countries that most likely have some sort of corporate structure (all of the above roles, just on a smaller scale).
Even if only half of those employees were working on the actual product and product-adjacent roles, it still seems hard to come up with 4500 jobs. In fact I think the number of employees might be what led to a bunch of their missteps over the past many years. Like the multiple interface redesigns that no one asked for and actively disliked.
Yeah, I could imagine their legal department actually making up a sizeable chunk, with how much the music industry loves to sue.
Let’s imagine we have massive departments for each one of those, like 300 people average for each of your example areas. For me it’s insane just thinking about it considering what the product actually is. I’m still left with 7200 people unaccounted for.
I dont get it either. The only explanation to this is that they had humans create spotify wrapped
Mark my words, a Disney style price raise is in the cards, probably before summer 2024
At this point Spotify offers less than competitors with Spotify hi-fi being a bunch of imaginary bullshit. I only subscribe to spotify when they offer me 3 months for the price of one.
Raising prices would be absurd.
What competitors do you recommend?
I use soundcloud and have used Bandcamp but Bandcamp got sold to Epic.
I have also heard of Faircamp which looks promising.one of my friends uses deezer, there is actual lossless audio there.
tidal is also supposed to be good, but i heard horrible things about the app.
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well, i am an audiophile myself and i do think having lossless out of principle is pretty reasonable, even if you can’t tell the difference. especially with how fast the internet has gotten, we don’t need to compress anymore. and with serious sets of headphones (even with DT770 pros) i can definetely tell a difference between an internal DAC and a 20€ external DAC. the better the components, the more expensive the product (plus audiophile tax).
edit: i read up on it and it turns out a properly compressed file is basically indistiguishable from an uncompressed one. (emphasis on “properly”) so you may have a point, but if the people want FLACs, why not let them have them? and if you spend little money on audio equipment, good for you if you like it that way, but people are allowed to spend money on stuff.
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Tidal brought FLAC this year, so this MQA critique doesn’t really apply anymore.
Nice I will give Deezer a try.
I switched to a TIDAL subscription a couple of months ago. The whole experience, apart from sound quality, is a downgrade from Spotify Premium. I still recommend it to people because supposedly they pay a better cut per stream to artists. The sound quality upgrade is quite noticable if you have good sound gear.
Apple Music is also very good. Lossless at no extra cost.
I like Apple Music and would use them if it wasn’t so god damned difficult to upload my own music. I have an eclectic collection of music and though, to be fair, I haven’t listened to a lot of it in a while, I would still like the option. Being on Linux there is no iTunes option and getting it to run under Wine hasn’t worked for me. So right now I use YouTube Music because it’s so easy. I may switch to Plex now that I have a decent internet connection.
I like Apple Music and would use them if it wasn’t so god damned difficult to upload my own music.
It’s easy enough, just add your music to the Music app on macOS.
Being on Linux there is no iTunes option and getting it to run under Wine hasn’t worked for me.
The Windows version of iTunes is terrible anyway. The Music app on macOS is much better. Can’t you hackintosh it?
Epic already sold off Bandcamp to another company (songtradr) and it’s probably not an improvement.
They can’t exactly afford to go higher than the round 10 we have a month. It will cost them a lot of customers just from the sheer inconvenience caused by the change in gift cards.
This effect would happen even at just 1 cent above the convenient pricing. That means if they increase the price, they have to make up for the immediate loss of “convenience users” which means higher price again which leads to an exponential spiral.
We are more likely to see ads being forced into Spotify premium.
Given the recent successes of other streaming platforms integrating ads into previously ad free levels, I think you’re right.
A higher price I can stand but ads in a paid service? If they do that, I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t just use ublock origin with Spotify on the web or a modded APK instead.
So glad I left when they paid Joe Rogan money
I’m sorry, they did what? Out of the loop on this one, but that guy is fucking brain cancer
Spotify paid him to be the exclusive distributor for his “first stop on the alt-right train” podcast. Rumored to have been $200 million.
Even more than that now, and that’s why I will never use spotify again.
These actions have real world CONSEQUENCES, and spotify is starting to see what they are.
I went back to good ol MP3 files about a year ago in an effort to lower montly subscriptions and the tiktokification of spotify was a big reason why.
Radiolemmy.com is also a nice alternative to find music you didn’t know about, the rotation just needs to grow
Not only the rotation, we need more presenters (every single one, including myself has been busy) to air on the station too, because honestly those sessions are peak Radio Lemmy. (please come back psythik we can’t let radio lemmy die)
I always have (stayed woth MP3s) but its harder and harder to even listen to them away from a phone. Major issue I have now is it’s a PITA to play a local library on networked speakers (Echo, specifically) w/out voice interaction being the sole means of use. I just want a tablet with a nice interface to allow me to play music on various Echo’s and speaker sets.
Bluetooth is an option, but it’s not really “home automation” setup friendly.
Jellyfin/plex/Navidone as a backend, synfonium as the app.
I dont use echo, but it has casting and upnp support so it should work with echo.
What do you mean with ‘tiktokification of Spotify’?
I stopped using Spotify at least a few years ago because they started serving adverts to paying customers - so I’m out of the loop.
That should help company morale. I’m so glad these selfless CEOs are always doing the right thing!
Hey just remember those CEOs take more risk eith their capital that’s why they deserve a bigger pay. Unlike these workers that have just been layer off weeks before Christmas, that have the luxury of a low risk reliable job!
Dude, it’s not possible to spend millions on sports deals with FC Barcelona, if you don’t cut peoples jobs away. That’s obviously more important!
Same shit, different corporation. They established sort of a monopoly by lower prices and venture capital. Now they start to collect large amounts of money and go down.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
LONDON (AP) — Spotify says it’s axing 17% of its global workforce, the music streaming service’s third round of layoffs this year as it moves to slash costs while focusing on becoming profitable.
In a message to employees posted on the company’s blog Monday, CEO Daniel Ek said the jobs were being cut as part of a “strategic reorientation.” The post didn’t specify how many employees would lose their jobs, but a spokesperson confirmed that it amounts to about 1,500 people.
Spotify had used cheap financing to expand the business and “invested significantly” in employees, content and marketing in 2020 and 2021, the blog post said.
But Ek indicated that the company was caught out as central banks started hiking interest rates last year, which can slow economic growth.
Ek said the “leaner structure” of the company will ensure “Spotify’s continued profitability.”
Tech companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta and IBM have announced hundreds of thousands of job cuts this year.
The original article contains 251 words, the summary contains 161 words. Saved 36%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
