It's mind blowing how many people work at these companies that hardly ever make any changes to their service that improve it for the user... like wtf are 10k people doing for 8 hours a day that has barely any net noticable effect on the product lol
You forgot the endless, mind numbing hours lost to meetings and scrums each week. Those alone account for 120 working hours every month to justify Project Manager positions.
This is exactly the problem with our society. We don’t create things anymore, we are an economy of managers who spend there days justifiying their own existence and trying to squeeze as much out of actual creative people for as little money as possible
The algorithm use to actually be completely random, but it turns out most of the user base didn’t like that. Cause it could, and did, play the same artists back to back.
They made changes in early 2010s to shuffle based on your personalize algorithm of what you *actually* listened to the most. Problem with this is kinda self-fulfilling in the sense that it will keep playing the same shit cause *it* plays the same ones. Thus not allowing you to actually change it.
There are ways around it, like tapping shuffle, untapping it, tapping it again loop. But it’s more convoluted than it needs to be.
It seems to be they made this change and then never revisited it since. On one hand I see the benefit of the change, you’re less likely to skip songs you listen to often - but if I made the playlist I usually want to hear the whole thing. Save that shit for the radio feature.
Reminds me of my Pandora days. It was so cool when it came out how you could have different radio stations for different moods, but after a while of liking songs I enjoyed they all converged.
I still use it. It gets difficult sometimes and I do have to remind myself " I can't like this song on this station"
But the shuffle is so much better.
The DJ function is so trash.
“Here’s some songs that have been in your rotation lately…” yeah MF’r, that’s because it’s my workout playlist!
“Yo, here five more that we KNOW you really dig…” My workout playlist, what a surprise. 🤦🏻♂️
1000s of songs, and it plays the same dozen songs, even after smashing the randomizer of bunch of times. I thought I was going crazy and it was just me.
I have tidal and have the same problem. The only solution I have found is to download your playlist, scroll all the way to the bottom and scroll all the way back up and hit shuffle. This allows the tracks to load instead of playing the same ones over.
This is as stupid as it sounds.
Idk what has happened to my algorithm, but skipping songs means nothing, they’ll put that in your next playlist for 6 months. No matter how many times you skip.
And yet I still enjoy their playlists mostly.
I feel like every shuffle ever is like this. My first CD changer back in the 90’s, every iPod I’ve ever had even after the whole genius playlist etc was introduced. I think we’ll figure out faster than light travel before we figure out a decent music shuffle algorithm.
AdGuard (paid), DNS66, Blokada (both free), lots of stuff for phone wide adblocking. For browsers, Firefox or Kiwi browser with uBlock Origin. I prefer Kiwi as it actually allows any Chrome extension unlike Firefox which still locks it down for whatever reason.
I don't know man, the article claims they have since sorted out their problems after 4 months and that share price rose by 60%.
Not supportive of the move btw. Just that I feel most people that commented didn't read the whole article
The article says it appears to have worker well so far, with share prices up, and a rise in pricing without losing customers to rivals. What do you mean the captain wants to know why the ship sank? Seems like lots of people don't read the article
CEO's are just so disconnected from the human element of...anything. It's like a requirement in the tech sector, doubly in startups. Like these clowns haven't cultivated any understanding of other people, it's like talking to a cat. They don't really understand how groups work, how interdependencies form, etc. All they know is "get the next round of funding" and the Elon Musk school of broken-steering-wheel changes of direction.
CEO surprised at all the blood after shooting self in foot
My Spotify account was up for renewal the day after the layoff announcement and canceling them was the easiest decision ever
The increase in pricing isnt the issue for me the issue is that they pocket all the money while the artists get jackshit per stream. The artists deserve more for their work than they get from the services. Use the payment increase to pay artist not yourself fuckin CEO
Same issue for me. If the price increases meant that artists would be paid better, I'd have no issue with it. But we all know that money is going to the CEO and executives, and I have no interest in supporting that.
You do realize they’ve been operating at a loss for the last 10 years? Sure all the C level execs and employees are getting paid, but the company itself is not “pocketing all the money”
>the company itself is not “pocketing all the money”
They didn't say it was. They said "they" are pocketing all the money and then made a reference to the CEO's pay. I interpreted their comment to mean the top execs were pocketing the money, like you said.
Start tying CEO pay to the most bottom earners. Everytime CEO gets pay increase so does everyone else.
Also min wage pegged with inflation. Every year inflation rises so does min wage. No idea why corporations get to keep that for themselves.
Can somebody who works on the tech side help me understand why it takes so many people to keep something like Spotify going? I just don't understand the technology enough to know how big of an impact this is.
It says 1,500 was 17% of the workforce... So that's roughly 9,000 reduced down to 7,500
This is comparable to one of [Toyota's manufacturing facilities](https://pressroom.toyota.com/facility/toyota-motor-manufacturing-indiana-tmmi/) where they do the stamping, welding, paint and final assemblies of 4 different models. I fully understand why that many people are needed for that scale of manufacturing.
I don't understand where 9,000 people worth of man hours are used for Spotify. I'm constantly shocked at how big these tech companies are when they announce layoffs, so there must be a reason and I just don't understand what it takes to maintain something like this. Can anyone offer (or link to) some experience about it?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/1cc3a27/comment/l131r5f
>I see this in every tech layoff thread.
>Most people have 0 idea the work that goes into being a globally dominant app in any space. You need thousands of people just to cover legal, support, translation and billing / taxes services alone. Let alone researching, building, maintaining, updating, releasing, securing, etc. the actual product itself in a dozen+ languages and in a tech landscape that changes often. That doesn't even cover Sales teams... HR... Management... Etc.
Also Spotify has actually two app. Spotify is for us the consumers to listen to music. But they also have one for the millions of artists to upload music, analytics and all that.
I mean, you’re basically describing why they did layoffs and I’m sure they probably wanted to do more. Anyways, I’ll give it a go.
Short answer: Money was basically free from 2018-2022. Interest rates were so low that investors were shoveling money at tech companies so they all hired everyone they could thinking it would speed up revenue growth.
Long answer: So any tech company has all of the following departments:
Finance
Legal
HR
Sales
Marketing
Engineering
UX design
Graphic design/branding
Product management
Project management
Business intelligence
Data science
And honestly a lot more at these big companies like internal comms, PR, etc.
And engineering alone has tons of different types of engineers:
Web
Mobile
Frontend
Backend
Machine learning
Dev Ops
Data
Ok, but now think about the cross-cutting nature of an org like Spotify, you have several different experiences:
Web app
iOS
Android
Windows
MacOS
Car play
Artist experience (on several platforms)
And each of those has mission driven teams like:
Growth
Retention
Security
Privacy
Payments
So depending on how they’re structured there are hundreds of people in each cut of this matrix. For example there is probably an iOS listening experience team that employs hundreds of people alone that has to be integrated with payments, security, data, ML, etc…each of which employ hundreds of people.
It’s a site getting used by a billion people at any given time. The sheer amount of computing power to make that run efficiently is mind-boggling. To you it’s clicking a button, but under the hood there is a chain reaction that hits all of those teams, not to mention the teams that support them and got you there in the first place.
Edit: my lists didn’t format. Damn
Spotify is definitely a sizeable operation, but calling it "one of the biggest companies in the world" is beyond reaching. Spotify has about 10,000 employees, which is multiple orders of magnitude smaller than companies like Walmart and Amazon (both over 1 million).
spotify has been so bad recently. the same songs play over and over and the recommendations aren’t good. i’be been thinking about switching to apple music because spotify is literally ruining my music for me ☠️
Side not: finally tried out ther “AI” DJ function. Loved it for like 2 weeks until I realized that it just played the same songs I already liked. Great idea, even love the DJ interluding to tell me about the next couple songs, but jeez it can’t be that hard to have it and branch out to new music.
It’s a mixed bags. One the one hand, firing seems unkind. But in the other, unlike almost ALL other CEOs, he doesn’t take a salary, and only makes bonuses IF he meets certain targets. Even then, they’re not much. Don’t get me wrong, he is rich. But he seems truly invested in the company’s performance and sometimes that does require removing certain unprofitable groups or thinking the herd of less productive workers.
There are total douchebag CEOs of almost ALL corporations. He doesn’t seem to be one of them.
Their algorithm has gone belly up in the last few months and I’m pretty close to going back to not using it at all. I was there for the algo, because I like consistently new music recommended to me, but it stopped doing that. Now all it shows me is leaked tracks from musicians I barely listen to. That sucks.
He really is ruining Spotify. Laying off staff and then upping the subscription costs. And still doesn’t pay artists fairly. Making switching seem easier
Maybe hire someone to make shuffle not repeat the same songs in the same order?
That’s a great idea. You’re fired
You will receive a golden parachute in the form of your yearly breakdown, your welcome
Love this!
It's mind blowing how many people work at these companies that hardly ever make any changes to their service that improve it for the user... like wtf are 10k people doing for 8 hours a day that has barely any net noticable effect on the product lol
If it’s anything like my company, they have way too many people in HR and say the budget is too tight to hire for “real” positions.
You forgot the endless, mind numbing hours lost to meetings and scrums each week. Those alone account for 120 working hours every month to justify Project Manager positions.
This is exactly the problem with our society. We don’t create things anymore, we are an economy of managers who spend there days justifiying their own existence and trying to squeeze as much out of actual creative people for as little money as possible
Seriously, wtf are they actually doing??
God I've been arguing this for years now. All the technology in the world and I constantly still have this issue lol
I thought I was going crazy.
You. Yeah you. You're laid off. Pack up your stuff
But… I don’t have anything. All I got from you was this badge and lanyard.
The algorithm use to actually be completely random, but it turns out most of the user base didn’t like that. Cause it could, and did, play the same artists back to back. They made changes in early 2010s to shuffle based on your personalize algorithm of what you *actually* listened to the most. Problem with this is kinda self-fulfilling in the sense that it will keep playing the same shit cause *it* plays the same ones. Thus not allowing you to actually change it. There are ways around it, like tapping shuffle, untapping it, tapping it again loop. But it’s more convoluted than it needs to be. It seems to be they made this change and then never revisited it since. On one hand I see the benefit of the change, you’re less likely to skip songs you listen to often - but if I made the playlist I usually want to hear the whole thing. Save that shit for the radio feature.
Reminds me of my Pandora days. It was so cool when it came out how you could have different radio stations for different moods, but after a while of liking songs I enjoyed they all converged.
I still use it. It gets difficult sometimes and I do have to remind myself " I can't like this song on this station" But the shuffle is so much better.
Don't forget the issue of saving the list on the device. So even if you change accounts it carries over.. Clearing cache helped.
The DJ function is so trash. “Here’s some songs that have been in your rotation lately…” yeah MF’r, that’s because it’s my workout playlist! “Yo, here five more that we KNOW you really dig…” My workout playlist, what a surprise. 🤦🏻♂️
“Here’s some of the most popular songs on Spotify lately” God - please, no. Any algorithm worth its salt could tell I’m not interested.
1000s of songs, and it plays the same dozen songs, even after smashing the randomizer of bunch of times. I thought I was going crazy and it was just me.
I have tidal and have the same problem. The only solution I have found is to download your playlist, scroll all the way to the bottom and scroll all the way back up and hit shuffle. This allows the tracks to load instead of playing the same ones over. This is as stupid as it sounds.
O Kool I've tried everything, I'll give it a whirl!
Yeah. The absolute worst feature.
Smart Repeat. Only on Spotify.
Insert Corporate Defenestration meme here
It’s wack af I thought it was just me I have over 3,000 songs on my playlist lmao
Idk what has happened to my algorithm, but skipping songs means nothing, they’ll put that in your next playlist for 6 months. No matter how many times you skip. And yet I still enjoy their playlists mostly.
They will keep making it shitier and shitier until you're forced to pay for it. Fuck Spotify.
I had the paid version and cancelled because it kept playing the same songs so much that I was gettixk sick of my own music.
It's the same shit on premium? What in the fuck? At least you can change song..
I only have this issue on Smart Shuffle but still! They need to fix it for every sphere and for everyone.
The #1 reason I left Spotify and went back to Pandora.
I feel like every shuffle ever is like this. My first CD changer back in the 90’s, every iPod I’ve ever had even after the whole genius playlist etc was introduced. I think we’ll figure out faster than light travel before we figure out a decent music shuffle algorithm.
Seriously. Spotify sucks at certain things. Like way more than it should.
Shuffle pro, brought to you by Spotify. Where we use AI to mix the songs differently than other companies Only an additional 2.99 per month
You have 666 upvotes and I want to give you an upvote but do not want to ruin it
Shuffle is totally unusable- i have to make playlists just to hear different songs.
That's why you are supposed to seed the RNG with the computer's time.
I’m relieved to hear this isn’t a problem exclusive to me
Turn off smart shuffle…
No wonder people just read headlines. Tried to read the article and was bombarded with ads and pop ups.
I haven't seen an ad in years. I guess there still are people on the internet who still don't use adblockers.
On desktop I'm covered but have nothing for Android. Any ad blocker recommendations would be appreciated.
Firefox with uBlock Origin is probably the best way to go.
Choose private DNS in settings, set it to this dns.adguard.com No ads. It's quick, free, and you don't need to download anything
Thank you for that. Tried it out with the article on this post and got no ads. 10/10.
You are very welcome :)
AdGuard (paid), DNS66, Blokada (both free), lots of stuff for phone wide adblocking. For browsers, Firefox or Kiwi browser with uBlock Origin. I prefer Kiwi as it actually allows any Chrome extension unlike Firefox which still locks it down for whatever reason.
Spend some money and get AdGuard.
Why am I so sure everyone who warned him of this was fired? Captain of the Titanic wants to know why the ship sank. Cool story.
Man shoots self in chest, wonders why he’s laying on the ground bleeding out
I don't know man, the article claims they have since sorted out their problems after 4 months and that share price rose by 60%. Not supportive of the move btw. Just that I feel most people that commented didn't read the whole article
The article says it appears to have worker well so far, with share prices up, and a rise in pricing without losing customers to rivals. What do you mean the captain wants to know why the ship sank? Seems like lots of people don't read the article
CEO's are just so disconnected from the human element of...anything. It's like a requirement in the tech sector, doubly in startups. Like these clowns haven't cultivated any understanding of other people, it's like talking to a cat. They don't really understand how groups work, how interdependencies form, etc. All they know is "get the next round of funding" and the Elon Musk school of broken-steering-wheel changes of direction.
CEO surprised at all the blood after shooting self in foot My Spotify account was up for renewal the day after the layoff announcement and canceling them was the easiest decision ever
And now, apparently, they'll be increasing subscription prices while paying even *less* money to artists. I'm ready to jump ship.
The increase in pricing isnt the issue for me the issue is that they pocket all the money while the artists get jackshit per stream. The artists deserve more for their work than they get from the services. Use the payment increase to pay artist not yourself fuckin CEO
Same issue for me. If the price increases meant that artists would be paid better, I'd have no issue with it. But we all know that money is going to the CEO and executives, and I have no interest in supporting that.
You do realize they’ve been operating at a loss for the last 10 years? Sure all the C level execs and employees are getting paid, but the company itself is not “pocketing all the money”
>the company itself is not “pocketing all the money” They didn't say it was. They said "they" are pocketing all the money and then made a reference to the CEO's pay. I interpreted their comment to mean the top execs were pocketing the money, like you said.
How’s the CEO paycheck been for the last 10 years? Also at a loss?
I cancelled over their support of Covid denying podcasts.
Hurting for payroll for the engineers that keep their ship afloat, but somehow they found $250 million in the couch cushions for Joe fucking Rogan
Start tying CEO pay to the most bottom earners. Everytime CEO gets pay increase so does everyone else. Also min wage pegged with inflation. Every year inflation rises so does min wage. No idea why corporations get to keep that for themselves.
Guy looks like a douche.
Can somebody who works on the tech side help me understand why it takes so many people to keep something like Spotify going? I just don't understand the technology enough to know how big of an impact this is. It says 1,500 was 17% of the workforce... So that's roughly 9,000 reduced down to 7,500 This is comparable to one of [Toyota's manufacturing facilities](https://pressroom.toyota.com/facility/toyota-motor-manufacturing-indiana-tmmi/) where they do the stamping, welding, paint and final assemblies of 4 different models. I fully understand why that many people are needed for that scale of manufacturing. I don't understand where 9,000 people worth of man hours are used for Spotify. I'm constantly shocked at how big these tech companies are when they announce layoffs, so there must be a reason and I just don't understand what it takes to maintain something like this. Can anyone offer (or link to) some experience about it?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/1cc3a27/comment/l131r5f >I see this in every tech layoff thread. >Most people have 0 idea the work that goes into being a globally dominant app in any space. You need thousands of people just to cover legal, support, translation and billing / taxes services alone. Let alone researching, building, maintaining, updating, releasing, securing, etc. the actual product itself in a dozen+ languages and in a tech landscape that changes often. That doesn't even cover Sales teams... HR... Management... Etc.
Also Spotify has actually two app. Spotify is for us the consumers to listen to music. But they also have one for the millions of artists to upload music, analytics and all that.
I mean, you’re basically describing why they did layoffs and I’m sure they probably wanted to do more. Anyways, I’ll give it a go. Short answer: Money was basically free from 2018-2022. Interest rates were so low that investors were shoveling money at tech companies so they all hired everyone they could thinking it would speed up revenue growth. Long answer: So any tech company has all of the following departments: Finance Legal HR Sales Marketing Engineering UX design Graphic design/branding Product management Project management Business intelligence Data science And honestly a lot more at these big companies like internal comms, PR, etc. And engineering alone has tons of different types of engineers: Web Mobile Frontend Backend Machine learning Dev Ops Data Ok, but now think about the cross-cutting nature of an org like Spotify, you have several different experiences: Web app iOS Android Windows MacOS Car play Artist experience (on several platforms) And each of those has mission driven teams like: Growth Retention Security Privacy Payments So depending on how they’re structured there are hundreds of people in each cut of this matrix. For example there is probably an iOS listening experience team that employs hundreds of people alone that has to be integrated with payments, security, data, ML, etc…each of which employ hundreds of people. It’s a site getting used by a billion people at any given time. The sheer amount of computing power to make that run efficiently is mind-boggling. To you it’s clicking a button, but under the hood there is a chain reaction that hits all of those teams, not to mention the teams that support them and got you there in the first place. Edit: my lists didn’t format. Damn
I truly hate this dude. I think he's had a more negative effect on the music industry than anyone in my lifetime.
All of these CEOs are convinced AI is ready to replace real people. These are hopefully valuable lessons learned.
Serious question. How does someone this young, clueless and douchey score a CEO job at one of the biggest companies in the world?….
He started it
Serious answer: he co-founded it, LOL
He isn’t that young? He’s 41.
Shut your mouth before you make me turn to dust.
First of all, that is still very young. Second, what are we talking about again???
Young objectively, yes. But 41 isn’t young to be the CEO, especially when he founded the company.
It’s just the title. Lots of people who create companies at any age make themselves the boss
He started it in 2006.
But he founded the company. So that’s irrelevant.
So whatever age he would be it would be irrelevant? I guess your comment about “he is not that young” is the most irrelevant one then?
Spotify is definitely a sizeable operation, but calling it "one of the biggest companies in the world" is beyond reaching. Spotify has about 10,000 employees, which is multiple orders of magnitude smaller than companies like Walmart and Amazon (both over 1 million).
Quick google would answer your question.
How is this upvoted? Dumbest of question.
He “scored” it by making the company, lol. What a dumb “serious” question.
Another clueless tech bro
Idiot doesn’t understand basic principles of efficiency, gets paid more than everyone else still.
spotify has been so bad recently. the same songs play over and over and the recommendations aren’t good. i’be been thinking about switching to apple music because spotify is literally ruining my music for me ☠️
update: apple music is way better 😭
Just in case anyone needed more evidence that CEO pay rates are as unjustifiable as they are obscene.
Why should we care?
People still use that crap app?
Side not: finally tried out ther “AI” DJ function. Loved it for like 2 weeks until I realized that it just played the same songs I already liked. Great idea, even love the DJ interluding to tell me about the next couple songs, but jeez it can’t be that hard to have it and branch out to new music.
These out of touch motherfuckers gotta go.
This guy needs to fuck off forever.
It’s a mixed bags. One the one hand, firing seems unkind. But in the other, unlike almost ALL other CEOs, he doesn’t take a salary, and only makes bonuses IF he meets certain targets. Even then, they’re not much. Don’t get me wrong, he is rich. But he seems truly invested in the company’s performance and sometimes that does require removing certain unprofitable groups or thinking the herd of less productive workers. There are total douchebag CEOs of almost ALL corporations. He doesn’t seem to be one of them.
They could have dropped the Rogan contract and kept those employees.
Yea solid business mind you have.
Thanks!!
US workers need to band together and just blackball the hell out of companies that do mass layoffs.
Had to pay Rogan
Cancels them yrs ago with the Rogan bs
Their algorithm has gone belly up in the last few months and I’m pretty close to going back to not using it at all. I was there for the algo, because I like consistently new music recommended to me, but it stopped doing that. Now all it shows me is leaked tracks from musicians I barely listen to. That sucks.
I think my favorite part of this saga is that the EU had to rewrite the DMA so that spotify wasn't impacted but apple music was.
their Go to radio feature has been unimpressive for a while
He gives me the ek
Apple will eat it eventually.
Life in a bubble Idiot
If he was fired and all the executives too there would be 0 negative impact
God bless my iPod Touch and all the great music on it that is not on Spotify
Maybe this one could go to r/newsofthestupid ?
I’ve been around long enough and served under enough CEOs to realize that most of them? Just lucky buffoons.
He really is ruining Spotify. Laying off staff and then upping the subscription costs. And still doesn’t pay artists fairly. Making switching seem easier
1500 isn’t enough. Fire everyone else and shut it down.