The complexity is not the player, it's the whole business... Winamp didn't have recommendations, tack on another 100-200 people working on data to surface those. There are close to a 100 markets being offered content with licencing deals, each with different regulations.

There are internal platforms, infrastructure, development, each platform requires team(s) to maintain, and develop them.

What's the size of the largest tech company (with a single product) that you've worked at? Just so I know how to translate how larger organisations work to a worldview that you have experience with.

Which is particularly surprising since they have multiple teams of highly compensated product people who are supposed to be guiding the overall product direction and preventing just that kind of incoherence.

You are assuming that Spotify is just the consumer facing app, but it's not. It's far more.

You've got all the bits of Spotify you don't see. Like:

* Apps and interfaces for labels to ingest their music

* Reporting and billing so all those labels get paid

* An ad platform to service free-tier users

* Embedded systems. Did you know Spotify has a commercial hardware division to integrate Spotify onto smart speakers and devices?

The surface is huge.

I am sure curl does too, with one guy running it. Spotify is not a telephone company. The engineering work hardly scale with the amount of users. There should be a need for some extra sales staff, lawyers and translators per market.

Their engineer staff numbers are just silly.

"We're basically cloning the entire feature set of Spotify and integrating that into our existing services" is bigger than you give it credit for.

I think it's pretty safe to call Spotify a big tech company at this point

Their competitors are not direct comparisons, though, and percentages can be a little misleading. Spotify is ~7.5k employees, and does one thing. Amazon is ~1.5m employees, and does many, many things.

Almost not at all.

Except now they force Social Justice Playlist on me

AMPLIFY WOMEN! BLACK HISTORY! WE STAND WITH THE BANNED!

Like this is what I want from my MUSIC app.

I thought Spotify dev was in Sweden, is that not the case?

... then proceeds to vague MBA word without a single number to support them.

> We debated making smaller reductions throughout 2024 and 2025

What was not debated was keeping people they hired.

> we still have too many people dedicated to supporting work and even doing work around the work rather than contributing to opportunities with real impact

We're left to guess what this means. What's work around the work? If that work is now unsavory, why can't they work on work rather than around it? Is this describing reducing the management layer? (support) or customer/partner support? Will they be replaced by automation? I get you don't want to go into specifics of who's let go, but then don't pretend you're providing a clear analysis, and don't give a washed out business lingo salad instead.

TBH I don't see what changed on Spotify for a customer perspective in the past few years. I still see bugs I reported years ago, the UI is largely the same. Not that I'm complaining, I just care about the music. But that leads me to think either the dev team is producing stuff that's on the fringe and optional, being quite inefficient, or mainly working on maintenance, and the bulk of the opex is going elsewhere.

I think that's a lot of what this is about: getting some leverage for deals with Spotify et al.

I think you meant to say not WORSE than Spotify.

The product has gone to hell, they need to fire all the product managers. I don't know how you fuck up a music UI this badly but...

You do know that Spotify has 600 million users? And that it got those users without practices like pushing its app in phone setup, account setup, settings, home screen, default music app, default music app in carplay etc.?

> As an aside, the source of this complaint being Spotify is interesting. I would love to know from artist who pays better between the two (because I dont think its spottify)

Neither pays artists directly. They pay money to rights holders. Why no one ever questions the rights holders is beyond my comprehension at this point.

Not really?

I mean, it's a music streaming platform with global presence (and to my experience, with no downtime), dealing with the regulatory environment, record labels, payment processing, and taxation across all different jurisdictions. Also needs to have customer service support in all languages it operates.

If you ask me, 8k doesn't sound absurd at all. Maybe a bit on the high end of what I would have guessed, but I'm possibly not accounting for new things they might be developing as well.

This is huge when I'm trying to stay in the flow while programming. Spotify is like a personal DJ that really groks how I work, especially now that it silently continues playing matching tracks when a playlist ends.

With Apple Music, I ended up switching back to iTunes at least once an hour. I really hope they won't be able to crush Spotify.

I imagine some people had similar thoughts when considering Netscape Navigator vs Internet Explorer.

> If you’re not in the AR/car divisions then what is the point.

Some people are more interested in a stable paycheck and will take a bullshit job to enable it.

If the problem is user acquisition, you don't get there with engineering improvements. Only exception is if those tech/product improvements are for increasing virality.

Yes they'll probably spend the money on marketing / PR, which makes sense since that's likely where the bottleneck (or foreseeable bottleneck given the other players in the industry) in their business is now.

This is somewhat tangential, but I feel like this happens often, as internal power and culture shifts away from being developer-driven to consumer- or manager-driven.

This doesn't happen for every company, thankfully.

Innovate to grow, if growth is the objective. For example, they could better serve the audiophile market with higher quality offerings. Not as much growth there though.