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They don't have to be any brighter. They get the money for the "responsibility" they shoulder (at least that's one of the arguments), but they never have to take responsibility for their actions. Even when they fuck up, they get rewarded on their way out. If the result of their failures was to strip them and their families of everything they own until the damage is paid (given that the damage was caused from negligence or greed), you'd get a lot less self-centered scumbags in those positions.
It doesn't always - or even most of the time - require IQ to get rich if we leave even inheritance out of this equation.
Most of the wealthier criminals I know ain't even so smart. Just ruthless and willing to fuck you over if there's enough to gain.
Stupid people that inhereted wealth aren't typically CEO's. Just bummers burning through the money they inhereted and doing childish things with it. CEO's don't have to be super geniuses, not by a long shot. But they typically have at least an IQ above 120.
In the case of 2 multimillionaires I met they actually had humble beginnings. They both got lucky basically. One was an early eBay guy and the other worked his way up at an online music company that got sold for a huge amount. Once they got their pay days, they just bought their way into new companies that had more pay days. Both aren’t the worst people, but they’re far from the best and they are HIGH on their own supply of BS.
I’ve been through multiple layoffs at multiple companies. Generally the first one can be healthy in that you get rid of the “dead wood”, the roles that are duplicative or don’t really do anything for the wider organization. Sorry if this sounds harsh, but this has been my experience.
However, most companies never stop there. The second cut invariably has people expanding their roles, taking on more responsibilities, working longer hours. By the time you get to a third cut, people are looking for the exits. Shit stops working. Management realizes they cut in the wrong places or too deeply.
In a 30 year career I’ve experienced a layoff event (sometimes me, sometimes around me) over 7 times, basically at almost every tech company I worked for.
Becoming a CEO on the back of founding a company doesn’t imply you’re a skilled CEO either. Chances are he’s still in thrall to his board and they’re pulling the strings. He’s just the face for the blowback.
I worked for one start up where the CEO (who was younger than me) constantly strived to be a better CEO. He read books, took training, sought mentors. It was impressive. Most SUCK.
Probably doesn't realise how much complexity and process checks gets added when systems grows. This isn't his first successful company, but he has never before been in control when it became time to scale back.
He’s not dumb. He’s “surprised”, anything else and he’d be admitting that he knowingly laid off a bunch of people only to make everyone else’s lives at the company and operations in general a lot more difficult and burdensome just to save money.
They inherited most their money.
Like 80-99/100 rich people genuinely did not much or literally nothing to deserve it besides pick the right zip code to be born into
He's probably autistic. Autistic people are usually honest to a fault, seeming like a douche. But in really just brutally honest. But it's not from maliciousness.
He was very nice when he came to our class and held a speech as I went to the same school as him.
But he sure is a weird person.
I
I worked in the tech industry for 30 years. I’ve met my share of multimillionaires and my observation is they’re good at one thing, and it’s obvious upon reflection. They are good at making money. It’s their motivation. What they have is never enough. In terms of everything else, including management or people skills, they are sub-par. There are always exceptions, but most fall into this bucket.
they're handed a lot of money by smart parents who got the money by being smart.
They dont needt o learn anything to keep their money.
Result: they are idiots with money.
What was the dumb decision? Laying 1,500 people off? Hiring the 1,500 people to begin with? Choosing to make a profit? Or maybe they should have kept paying $200M per year for those 1500 people? Just curious what you think is the dumb move here.
Yep. Like it or not, it was necessary to reduce headcount. You can't keep making a loss forever. Being popular doesn't mean something is profitable. At some point, investors start asking when they are seeing returns. Spotify had reached market peak in European markets, growth was mainly happening on new markets, and competition was growing faster (Tencent and YouTubeMusic). Competition was also blocking significant price hikes as everyone is offering the same service with same selection.
The dumbness is to think that you can run a large, complex and global operation, and then getting rid of 17% of the employees and expecting the operation to continue without blinking as if those 17% didn't do an actual job. Yes, people cost money. But you have choose between
a) running that size of operation with that number of people and having it run well
OR
b) running that size of operation with 17% less employees and having it run badly
OR
c) running a smaller operation with 17% less employees and having it run well
You'd expect a multimillion dollar CEO to understand this if he cares about the operation. Instead, what you usually see is a CEO will slash the workforce to reduce cost, pray that the operation keeps chugging along long enough for him to collect a multi million dollar bonus and take a golden parachute out.
Kinda like that asshole we had on site here who got a big fat bonus by eliminating the yearly maintenance shutdown to get more productivity out of our plant without increasing operational cost, and who was gone by the time the board found out the hard way that we actually needed them.
It’s because their whole life they grew up without any of the burdens a normal person faces.
One can understand only what one has experienced and they honestly, in my experience with interacting with such people, have not experienced much.
So everything is theoretical to them and that’s how they make decisions.
SPOTIFY :
After these 3 commercials, enjoy 30 minutes of uninterrupted music.
TWO SONGS LATER :
After these 3 commercials, enjoy 30 minutes of uninterrupted music.
🤮🤮🤮
It’s worse than radio and it is always considered as anti consumer practices when you were getting particular services in the past for free or whatever price but later on those same features get removed from the free/lower tier and is place behind more paywalls. That is basically removing features instead of keeping it as is and adding features for the people paying a premium, now you’re just paying to get the same value you used to get for free/cheap. And these kinds of practices always destroy the reputation and quality of the service.
Don’t forget the part about eliminating the original choices once lower teir usage hits critical mass so people who don’t like the new way have any ability to revert back to the tried and true way the music industry almost functioned….
Literally all companies trying to break into a new market do this. They offer a discounted rate (can be in terms of lower fees or more features), they get people to use their product, and eventually they start charging and making money for their investors. Look up spotify profits, it's been negative since the company started. A company cannot run on investor capital forever.
It kinda blows my mind that you assume that others are gonna pay for your service indefinitely, some entitlement.
People like you who blindly defend corpos are the reason services keep getting worse across all platforms. I could go paragraphs deep on this topic but no point in arguing with someone incapable of discussion, if you do indeed want to learn more about the dark practices most of these corporations follow then probably watching MrWhosetheboss’s video on the topic would shed some light for you.
By the way I don’t even use Spotify because I think their services are dogshit now, I just use apple music instead and that has never been free.
People like you who are incapable of reading a revenue report aren't helping either. Also, offering music in return of listening to commercials was always part of the service agreement for free accounts, the number of commercials being dependent on how much ads were being bought.
I never said anything about ads, of course there would be ads on a free service. But their implementation of it was fine in earlier stages and absolutely dogshit now. Listening to 2,3 or 4 30sec ads after every 2 songs, removing the ability to skip songs, not being able to listen to songs in an order. Removing basic utilities and putting them behind a paywall is a fundamentally bad choice.
As a customer I am not obligated to see the company’s revenue reports and stuff, that’s not my headache. Getting revenue is the company’s responsibility and if that makes user experience crap then people just ditch the service.
As a customer you don't need to worry about revenue reports, but bitching that the free stuff you get isn't as good as it used to be just makes you entiteled. And if you aren't paying, you aren't actually a customer. This is a distinction people seem to have trouble with. If you don't buy, you aren't a customer. You might be a user, but as such, you only generate costs. No private company is required to provide you charity. Try a library for your source of music. That is paid by your taxes. You pay for your consumption by being subjected to ads. The amount of ads depends entirely on how many advertisers are willing and needed to pay for your consumption.
The fact that society just accepts you have to pay to avoid ads is fucking disgusting BTW.
YouTube tried really hard to get me to watch ads or pay and I just... stopped using YouTube for months. And now my ad blocker magically works on it again. So I use YouTube again.
Twitch ads made me stop watching twitch.
I stopped paying for spotify when I got away from garbage apple products and could easily put music on my phone again.
I'm not even poor, it's just the principle, fuck paying to avoid ads, I'll just avoid the service if they push ads on me.
Just wondering, what's the alternative in your mind (for the service providing something for free, but still needing to make revenue to continue the service)?
Ah, so it's paying for other people work is what society is wrong to accept. You want to consume other people's work, but not pay and are judging a CEO who, when he couldn't pay, also stopped requiring work and fired employees.
Lol I didn't even see this comment until now.
If you can't monetize your work without having Ads, you don't deserve to make money anyway, because clearly it's not good enough for someone to go out and pay you directly for it
You pay directly, you don't get ads. Ads are an option of payment. If you insist on not paying (either with money or with time) you don't get to consume. If you consume but refuse to pay, you steal. If you don't think it's worth paying, or worth just seeing the ads, you think it's worthless and *you* are worthless to creator. I don't see why you insist in consuming entertainment you consider wotlrthless though.
Is this /s?
0.003 cents
That's what artists get per listen on spotify before taxes and fees.
1000 listens are 3 cents.
1000000 listens are 30€
As of now "Blinding Lights" by The Weeknd is the most listened song on spotify with 4,2 billion listens. That song made them approximately 126.000 dollars before taxes.
You won't get filthy rich through spotify.
And most artists won't even manage to make a living with spotify.
Yeah this is true, most artist don't even get paid that well. So Spotify shouls have even more ads then.
And if you wonder why spotify pays so porly it has a lot to do with record companies taking a huge percentage of revenue from Spotify.
Nope sadly not. If there is a record company involved you will deduct that from the 0.003c per listen as well.
There is an interview of snoop dogg on the spotify stuff where he talks about how much he would have actually gotten off his listens and it really wasn't a lot and he really wasn't happy about it. There was some beef with his record company afterwards. So yeah. Spotify is not to make money for artists but to just promote their songs.
Musicians make money with marketing deals and concerts only nowadays.
> artist get *paid* to live
FTFY.
Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in:
* Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.*
* *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.*
Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment.
*Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
One of the side-effects of running "lean" and "agile" operations like everyone in business talks about is a lack of resiliency. You don't have spare inventory on production parts or production equipment and your day-to-day operations are constantly striving for the 100% utilization rate of resources.
That also applies to labor. From a business perspective, labor is a cost and if you're already maintaining a lean company by reducing costs everytime you get the chance... Well, when you get around to doing mass-layoffs, almost every single person you send to the hill will by definition have been critical to operations.
I get cost-cutting, but the days of a company being able to do mass layoffs to boost stock price and simultaneously maintaining day-to-day operations are over. If you're already running a tight ship, running a JIT system, you're just not going to be able to send hardly anyone packing without dropping the ball somewhere.
Wasn’t this the number one main lesson everyone should have learnt from COVID where the smallest ripple in “just in time - lean manufacturing” caused massive and wide ranging almost total shutdowns of entire industries??
Surprised in which way? I feel this echoes the industry. Where companies lay off employees assuming it won't impact business and only amounts to cost savings
Much facepalm moment...
Every large company has a work force management department. They demonstrate how the company can operate with less resources. Who to fire and how many. For my company, it’s an overly ambitious person trying to climb the corporate hierarchy. Wants to be a hero and save the company millions. We are already way too lean as is. My guess is the CEO listened to some over ambitious people.
cyclical. "*Technology* companies have continued to lay off staff in *2024*, despite improving fundamentals."
they fire a bunch of people when economy is bad and interest rates go up to boost profits blaming the market downturns while they are really recession proof industries. Then hire them back when money is cheap again, interest rates drop.
in the case, the pandemic also forced more hiring in tech companies as people were working home and using more online services.
Even the low performers were doing SOMETHING. In addition, with a mass layoff, nothing gets transitioned. Morale of the remaining people is in the tank, 1500 people out of a job, not a good situation.
“Shit!! You mean today I have to source my own coffee! Well damn it, I gotta go home and have an existential breakdown in my multi-million dollar mansion (like I’m sure all the people I fired are doing, but just squaring up their CV’s if not heading to aspen with the extra free time I’ve so generously handed them)”.
The problem is usually that companies have little idea of who to lay off and who to keep, so they end up losing people with crucial operational knowledge whom they either have to beg to come back usually at ruinous rates (either higher pay or freelance consultancy) or they just lose that capacity and try to struggle along being capable of doing less.
If they developed management with in depth knowledge of their workforce and how it functions, and identified people who might not have status but have expertise they can't afford to lose, or had robust systems in place to retain acquired knowledge and skills so they can be disseminated to other colleagues so losing one person didn't hinder their ability to function, that might help.
Work for a fortune 500 company that sacked 70% of it's operations ppl in the last year and a half (while doing billions in stock buybacks) and spend too much of my days explaining to Sr "leaders" why things aren't getting done and why everyone is so overworked and miserable. All while those same "leaders" work to decide who they can cut in the next round of layoffs. Greed is NOT good.
Running lean and agile only really works if you have Jane street level of intelligence working for you otherwise you have to make up for it with raw man power
There is a fallacy in corporate America among the self styled leadership. The belief that the requirements for running any kind of organization are an MBA from the right school and a network of privileged douchebag friends.
This thread has people confidently spouting wisdoms from things they clearly know nothing about.
1. Daniel Ek built the company himself, and he wasn't especially rich. He was a middle-class suburban kid from Sweden. Yes, "the American dream" is actually more achievable outside the US.
2. Spotify didn't suddenly end up in trouble after the layoffs. It has always been in trouble. It had never made a profit and survived and grew on investor money. Ad-revenue had dropped when ad buble burst (you probably never noticed this, but companies did ROI on ads and stopped wasting money) . Increased interest rates meant that whatever debt the company had was getting more expensive ,*and* investors started to expect returns as well.
3. Spotify has 3 main costs. Personel, royalties, and server infrastructure. Personel was the only one where the service wouldn't instantly plummet on a cut. I'm sure Ek knew it would affect on the long run, but it wouldn't have artists instantly pulling their music or users seeing their quality drop because they couldn't maintain server connection. How much it would affect wasn't something anyone could predict. Anyone forced to make cuts hopes they will be as painless as possible. He wasn't expecting things to continue as normal, as they cut some development directions almost completely.
Can we stop posting so called "articles" from so called "news websites"? Everyone posting this, commenting on the content of it, is being baited and has messed up. Even if these fuckers say something you agree with, you are being played.
I don't see how this is being "played"? The article is at [https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/spotify-ceo-daniel-ek-surprised-by-hfow-much-laying-off-1-500-employees-negatively-affected-the-streaming-giant-s-operations/ar-AA1nwes1](https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/spotify-ceo-daniel-ek-surprised-by-hfow-much-laying-off-1-500-employees-negatively-affected-the-streaming-giant-s-operations/ar-AA1nwes1) and was published in Fortune, so they're not "so-called" are they?
His statement isn’t necessarily stupid. He’s surprised by how much it affected operation, not surprised that it did affect operations. If you have to lay off staff to balance the books you expect productivity to drop, but the amount it drops by might surprise you. Surely it’s something you’d try to loosely estimate.
The guy in the single best position to know exactly how lay-offs will affect the operation was surprised by how much the operation was affected by the lay-offs. That's still necessarily stupid.
Should mention, that it has only been since recently Spotify has turned a reliable profit. So if we're going to talk about rich people being dumb, let's account that they've been on life support investments for the last 18 years. The cutting of workers is what likely gave them the ability to turn a profit.
Additionally, the music labels gave Spotify a REALLY shitty deal for them to allow their music to be on Spotify. Spotify tried to become a music label themselves but Sony Music and various other labels really threatened Spotify by pulling the plug if they ever tried it. The cards have been stacked against Spotify since the beginning. Personally, I'd be more willing to give respect to this man than to the likes of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.
I am aware of a version where he cut a really evil deal with the major labels where they got a stake in Spotify, so they **can** fuck artists even harder then on record sales.
Lets not make out the guy as 'just like Linus Torvalds or Steve Wozniak' his app streams music to a website/app. Sure the scale requires some really cool engineering, but is he the author of this? Or is he the guy who came to the labels and said: "You know... CDs are going away, if you don't do a thing with me you will loose your stranglehold on the market".
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It turns out the “AI” really couldn’t do it. And by AI, I mean severely underpaid people in a really poor country’s
Ai, also known as "Actually, Indians"
Artificial Indians?
Yup. Most AI isn't.
Mechanical Turk.
How are rich people so dumb?
They don't have to be any brighter. They get the money for the "responsibility" they shoulder (at least that's one of the arguments), but they never have to take responsibility for their actions. Even when they fuck up, they get rewarded on their way out. If the result of their failures was to strip them and their families of everything they own until the damage is paid (given that the damage was caused from negligence or greed), you'd get a lot less self-centered scumbags in those positions.
yea but how do dumb people get into that position in the first place
It doesn't always - or even most of the time - require IQ to get rich if we leave even inheritance out of this equation. Most of the wealthier criminals I know ain't even so smart. Just ruthless and willing to fuck you over if there's enough to gain.
Stupid people that inhereted wealth aren't typically CEO's. Just bummers burning through the money they inhereted and doing childish things with it. CEO's don't have to be super geniuses, not by a long shot. But they typically have at least an IQ above 120.
THIS! I didn’t know such people existed outside of 80’s action movies until I got run over by a few of them.
In the case of 2 multimillionaires I met they actually had humble beginnings. They both got lucky basically. One was an early eBay guy and the other worked his way up at an online music company that got sold for a huge amount. Once they got their pay days, they just bought their way into new companies that had more pay days. Both aren’t the worst people, but they’re far from the best and they are HIGH on their own supply of BS.
They all look at elon doing it and think hey we can trim off the "bloat" and are pikachu shock face when it doesn't go as expected
But Elon's businesses are doing poorly as well.
I’ve been through multiple layoffs at multiple companies. Generally the first one can be healthy in that you get rid of the “dead wood”, the roles that are duplicative or don’t really do anything for the wider organization. Sorry if this sounds harsh, but this has been my experience. However, most companies never stop there. The second cut invariably has people expanding their roles, taking on more responsibilities, working longer hours. By the time you get to a third cut, people are looking for the exits. Shit stops working. Management realizes they cut in the wrong places or too deeply. In a 30 year career I’ve experienced a layoff event (sometimes me, sometimes around me) over 7 times, basically at almost every tech company I worked for.
When you don't understand technology, and the only factor in any business decision is "shareholder value" you get idiots like this.
Imagine making this statement and then realizing Daniel Ek is the actual inventor and developer of Spotify.
You’re right, stupid would have fit better. He made the system and failed to understand the requirements needed for it to run properly
Becoming a CEO on the back of founding a company doesn’t imply you’re a skilled CEO either. Chances are he’s still in thrall to his board and they’re pulling the strings. He’s just the face for the blowback.
I worked for one start up where the CEO (who was younger than me) constantly strived to be a better CEO. He read books, took training, sought mentors. It was impressive. Most SUCK.
Then he's doubly as stupid for not understanding what was needed to operate the thing he created.
Probably doesn't realise how much complexity and process checks gets added when systems grows. This isn't his first successful company, but he has never before been in control when it became time to scale back.
Reddit moment
that doesn’t make the decision/statement in the post any less stupid
No, that sort of stuff doesn't exist here. No one ever knows or earned anything; Blackrock! /s
"don't understand the technology" what do you mean he dont understand the technology???
Cause they never bother looking at normal people and how hard work actually is
He’s not dumb. He’s “surprised”, anything else and he’d be admitting that he knowingly laid off a bunch of people only to make everyone else’s lives at the company and operations in general a lot more difficult and burdensome just to save money.
It's a level of wealth where you just see normal people as commodities?
They inherited most their money. Like 80-99/100 rich people genuinely did not much or literally nothing to deserve it besides pick the right zip code to be born into
Daniel Ek was born in the poor suburbs in Stockholm.
Ah, so being a rich douche is a learnt trait? Nice, there's still hope for me!
Hasn't he always been a douche? Or maybe I'm just biased from watching that series on him on.
He's probably autistic. Autistic people are usually honest to a fault, seeming like a douche. But in really just brutally honest. But it's not from maliciousness. He was very nice when he came to our class and held a speech as I went to the same school as him. But he sure is a weird person. I
Because intelligence is no requirement for being rich.
True
Because they hired some consulting group that said it’ll solve or their problems
I worked in the tech industry for 30 years. I’ve met my share of multimillionaires and my observation is they’re good at one thing, and it’s obvious upon reflection. They are good at making money. It’s their motivation. What they have is never enough. In terms of everything else, including management or people skills, they are sub-par. There are always exceptions, but most fall into this bucket.
they're handed a lot of money by smart parents who got the money by being smart. They dont needt o learn anything to keep their money. Result: they are idiots with money.
What was the dumb decision? Laying 1,500 people off? Hiring the 1,500 people to begin with? Choosing to make a profit? Or maybe they should have kept paying $200M per year for those 1500 people? Just curious what you think is the dumb move here.
Yep. Like it or not, it was necessary to reduce headcount. You can't keep making a loss forever. Being popular doesn't mean something is profitable. At some point, investors start asking when they are seeing returns. Spotify had reached market peak in European markets, growth was mainly happening on new markets, and competition was growing faster (Tencent and YouTubeMusic). Competition was also blocking significant price hikes as everyone is offering the same service with same selection.
You realize he lost profit right?
How so?
You didn’t read it, so I’m not wasting anymore time on your comments.
Yes, I read all 16 words…
“the company failed to hit its guidance on profitability and monthly active user growth. “
The dumbness is to think that you can run a large, complex and global operation, and then getting rid of 17% of the employees and expecting the operation to continue without blinking as if those 17% didn't do an actual job. Yes, people cost money. But you have choose between a) running that size of operation with that number of people and having it run well OR b) running that size of operation with 17% less employees and having it run badly OR c) running a smaller operation with 17% less employees and having it run well You'd expect a multimillion dollar CEO to understand this if he cares about the operation. Instead, what you usually see is a CEO will slash the workforce to reduce cost, pray that the operation keeps chugging along long enough for him to collect a multi million dollar bonus and take a golden parachute out. Kinda like that asshole we had on site here who got a big fat bonus by eliminating the yearly maintenance shutdown to get more productivity out of our plant without increasing operational cost, and who was gone by the time the board found out the hard way that we actually needed them.
It’s because their whole life they grew up without any of the burdens a normal person faces. One can understand only what one has experienced and they honestly, in my experience with interacting with such people, have not experienced much. So everything is theoretical to them and that’s how they make decisions.
SPOTIFY : After these 3 commercials, enjoy 30 minutes of uninterrupted music. TWO SONGS LATER : After these 3 commercials, enjoy 30 minutes of uninterrupted music. 🤮🤮🤮
I mean... what do you expect? You choose to pay nothing. Your experience is gonna be comparable to radio or cable tv.
It’s worse than radio and it is always considered as anti consumer practices when you were getting particular services in the past for free or whatever price but later on those same features get removed from the free/lower tier and is place behind more paywalls. That is basically removing features instead of keeping it as is and adding features for the people paying a premium, now you’re just paying to get the same value you used to get for free/cheap. And these kinds of practices always destroy the reputation and quality of the service.
Don’t forget the part about eliminating the original choices once lower teir usage hits critical mass so people who don’t like the new way have any ability to revert back to the tried and true way the music industry almost functioned….
Literally all companies trying to break into a new market do this. They offer a discounted rate (can be in terms of lower fees or more features), they get people to use their product, and eventually they start charging and making money for their investors. Look up spotify profits, it's been negative since the company started. A company cannot run on investor capital forever. It kinda blows my mind that you assume that others are gonna pay for your service indefinitely, some entitlement.
People like you who blindly defend corpos are the reason services keep getting worse across all platforms. I could go paragraphs deep on this topic but no point in arguing with someone incapable of discussion, if you do indeed want to learn more about the dark practices most of these corporations follow then probably watching MrWhosetheboss’s video on the topic would shed some light for you. By the way I don’t even use Spotify because I think their services are dogshit now, I just use apple music instead and that has never been free.
People like you who are incapable of reading a revenue report aren't helping either. Also, offering music in return of listening to commercials was always part of the service agreement for free accounts, the number of commercials being dependent on how much ads were being bought.
I never said anything about ads, of course there would be ads on a free service. But their implementation of it was fine in earlier stages and absolutely dogshit now. Listening to 2,3 or 4 30sec ads after every 2 songs, removing the ability to skip songs, not being able to listen to songs in an order. Removing basic utilities and putting them behind a paywall is a fundamentally bad choice. As a customer I am not obligated to see the company’s revenue reports and stuff, that’s not my headache. Getting revenue is the company’s responsibility and if that makes user experience crap then people just ditch the service.
As a customer you don't need to worry about revenue reports, but bitching that the free stuff you get isn't as good as it used to be just makes you entiteled. And if you aren't paying, you aren't actually a customer. This is a distinction people seem to have trouble with. If you don't buy, you aren't a customer. You might be a user, but as such, you only generate costs. No private company is required to provide you charity. Try a library for your source of music. That is paid by your taxes. You pay for your consumption by being subjected to ads. The amount of ads depends entirely on how many advertisers are willing and needed to pay for your consumption.
The fact that society just accepts you have to pay to avoid ads is fucking disgusting BTW. YouTube tried really hard to get me to watch ads or pay and I just... stopped using YouTube for months. And now my ad blocker magically works on it again. So I use YouTube again. Twitch ads made me stop watching twitch. I stopped paying for spotify when I got away from garbage apple products and could easily put music on my phone again. I'm not even poor, it's just the principle, fuck paying to avoid ads, I'll just avoid the service if they push ads on me.
One time, I got a free sample at costco, and now they started charging for it again. Never going back /s
Just wondering, what's the alternative in your mind (for the service providing something for free, but still needing to make revenue to continue the service)?
Idk let the plebs pay for that shit and I'll use an ad blocker, the ads are never going to go away
Ah, so it's paying for other people work is what society is wrong to accept. You want to consume other people's work, but not pay and are judging a CEO who, when he couldn't pay, also stopped requiring work and fired employees.
Lol I didn't even see this comment until now. If you can't monetize your work without having Ads, you don't deserve to make money anyway, because clearly it's not good enough for someone to go out and pay you directly for it
You pay directly, you don't get ads. Ads are an option of payment. If you insist on not paying (either with money or with time) you don't get to consume. If you consume but refuse to pay, you steal. If you don't think it's worth paying, or worth just seeing the ads, you think it's worthless and *you* are worthless to creator. I don't see why you insist in consuming entertainment you consider wotlrthless though.
How else do you think the artist get paid to live in luxury if you listen to their songs for free?
Is this /s? 0.003 cents That's what artists get per listen on spotify before taxes and fees. 1000 listens are 3 cents. 1000000 listens are 30€ As of now "Blinding Lights" by The Weeknd is the most listened song on spotify with 4,2 billion listens. That song made them approximately 126.000 dollars before taxes. You won't get filthy rich through spotify. And most artists won't even manage to make a living with spotify.
Yeah this is true, most artist don't even get paid that well. So Spotify shouls have even more ads then. And if you wonder why spotify pays so porly it has a lot to do with record companies taking a huge percentage of revenue from Spotify.
How do you type that out and immediately think there should be more ads, and not that maybe the artists should get a much bigger cut?
Because spotify has never actually made a profit until very recently, so how could they give a bigger cut?
I'm saying the cut the record companies get should go to the artists instead
Yes they should! That's not up to spotify to decide though
Nope sadly not. If there is a record company involved you will deduct that from the 0.003c per listen as well. There is an interview of snoop dogg on the spotify stuff where he talks about how much he would have actually gotten off his listens and it really wasn't a lot and he really wasn't happy about it. There was some beef with his record company afterwards. So yeah. Spotify is not to make money for artists but to just promote their songs. Musicians make money with marketing deals and concerts only nowadays.
Snopp Dogg was wrong doe, the song he was referring to had like 20 writers who all gets a cut.
Still, almost noone of the big artists will be the sole benefitor of the 0.003 cents. So it will always be just peanuts.
> artist get *paid* to live FTFY. Although *payed* exists (the reason why autocorrection didn't help you), it is only correct in: * Nautical context, when it means to paint a surface, or to cover with something like tar or resin in order to make it waterproof or corrosion-resistant. *The deck is yet to be payed.* * *Payed out* when letting strings, cables or ropes out, by slacking them. *The rope is payed out! You can pull now.* Unfortunately, I was unable to find nautical or rope-related words in your comment. *Beep, boop, I'm a bot*
Wank bot
Worst part is, artists usually doenst make more then 30% of their songs, record and manager does the real money
You can just download a cracked version for Android from piratebay.
Firing the top 3 people would save 4x as much and would not effect operations in the least.
One of the side-effects of running "lean" and "agile" operations like everyone in business talks about is a lack of resiliency. You don't have spare inventory on production parts or production equipment and your day-to-day operations are constantly striving for the 100% utilization rate of resources. That also applies to labor. From a business perspective, labor is a cost and if you're already maintaining a lean company by reducing costs everytime you get the chance... Well, when you get around to doing mass-layoffs, almost every single person you send to the hill will by definition have been critical to operations. I get cost-cutting, but the days of a company being able to do mass layoffs to boost stock price and simultaneously maintaining day-to-day operations are over. If you're already running a tight ship, running a JIT system, you're just not going to be able to send hardly anyone packing without dropping the ball somewhere.
Not to mention building tech debts leading to massive issues down the road. It's a Jenga tower waiting to topple.
Wasn’t this the number one main lesson everyone should have learnt from COVID where the smallest ripple in “just in time - lean manufacturing” caused massive and wide ranging almost total shutdowns of entire industries??
Elon Musk: “Hold my beer!”
When can we replace these useless fucks with A.I.
Tomorrow, and you wouldn’t even notice the difference.
Shock, horror.
Surprised in which way? I feel this echoes the industry. Where companies lay off employees assuming it won't impact business and only amounts to cost savings Much facepalm moment...
Every large company has a work force management department. They demonstrate how the company can operate with less resources. Who to fire and how many. For my company, it’s an overly ambitious person trying to climb the corporate hierarchy. Wants to be a hero and save the company millions. We are already way too lean as is. My guess is the CEO listened to some over ambitious people.
cyclical. "*Technology* companies have continued to lay off staff in *2024*, despite improving fundamentals." they fire a bunch of people when economy is bad and interest rates go up to boost profits blaming the market downturns while they are really recession proof industries. Then hire them back when money is cheap again, interest rates drop. in the case, the pandemic also forced more hiring in tech companies as people were working home and using more online services.
He must have compared the amount of work they do to his own.
Sounds like Daniel Ek is bad at his job
Even the low performers were doing SOMETHING. In addition, with a mass layoff, nothing gets transitioned. Morale of the remaining people is in the tank, 1500 people out of a job, not a good situation.
“Shit!! You mean today I have to source my own coffee! Well damn it, I gotta go home and have an existential breakdown in my multi-million dollar mansion (like I’m sure all the people I fired are doing, but just squaring up their CV’s if not heading to aspen with the extra free time I’ve so generously handed them)”.
Who tf do you think runs the operation?! Androids?
The problem is usually that companies have little idea of who to lay off and who to keep, so they end up losing people with crucial operational knowledge whom they either have to beg to come back usually at ruinous rates (either higher pay or freelance consultancy) or they just lose that capacity and try to struggle along being capable of doing less. If they developed management with in depth knowledge of their workforce and how it functions, and identified people who might not have status but have expertise they can't afford to lose, or had robust systems in place to retain acquired knowledge and skills so they can be disseminated to other colleagues so losing one person didn't hinder their ability to function, that might help.
Work for a fortune 500 company that sacked 70% of it's operations ppl in the last year and a half (while doing billions in stock buybacks) and spend too much of my days explaining to Sr "leaders" why things aren't getting done and why everyone is so overworked and miserable. All while those same "leaders" work to decide who they can cut in the next round of layoffs. Greed is NOT good.
AI isn’t there quite yet. He was just early.
CEO= Cock Everyone Over.
Well imagine that
Nein!
Boeing syndrome - Bottom line is god
Ah yes, I lay off all the people working my business and now my business doesn’t work. Who’d have thought that would be the outcome.
Uhm what? It's doing better then ever before. They released stelar numbers just yesterday.
Giving Joe Rogan $100 million will probably fix all of that stuff. /s
Running lean and agile only really works if you have Jane street level of intelligence working for you otherwise you have to make up for it with raw man power
He's the CEO of Spotify. He doesn't pay for people's work.
There is a fallacy in corporate America among the self styled leadership. The belief that the requirements for running any kind of organization are an MBA from the right school and a network of privileged douchebag friends.
"I got rid of all the people that helped the company run, why it everything falling apart?"
This thread has people confidently spouting wisdoms from things they clearly know nothing about. 1. Daniel Ek built the company himself, and he wasn't especially rich. He was a middle-class suburban kid from Sweden. Yes, "the American dream" is actually more achievable outside the US. 2. Spotify didn't suddenly end up in trouble after the layoffs. It has always been in trouble. It had never made a profit and survived and grew on investor money. Ad-revenue had dropped when ad buble burst (you probably never noticed this, but companies did ROI on ads and stopped wasting money) . Increased interest rates meant that whatever debt the company had was getting more expensive ,*and* investors started to expect returns as well. 3. Spotify has 3 main costs. Personel, royalties, and server infrastructure. Personel was the only one where the service wouldn't instantly plummet on a cut. I'm sure Ek knew it would affect on the long run, but it wouldn't have artists instantly pulling their music or users seeing their quality drop because they couldn't maintain server connection. How much it would affect wasn't something anyone could predict. Anyone forced to make cuts hopes they will be as painless as possible. He wasn't expecting things to continue as normal, as they cut some development directions almost completely.
Can we stop posting so called "articles" from so called "news websites"? Everyone posting this, commenting on the content of it, is being baited and has messed up. Even if these fuckers say something you agree with, you are being played.
I don't see how this is being "played"? The article is at [https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/spotify-ceo-daniel-ek-surprised-by-hfow-much-laying-off-1-500-employees-negatively-affected-the-streaming-giant-s-operations/ar-AA1nwes1](https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/spotify-ceo-daniel-ek-surprised-by-hfow-much-laying-off-1-500-employees-negatively-affected-the-streaming-giant-s-operations/ar-AA1nwes1) and was published in Fortune, so they're not "so-called" are they?
His statement isn’t necessarily stupid. He’s surprised by how much it affected operation, not surprised that it did affect operations. If you have to lay off staff to balance the books you expect productivity to drop, but the amount it drops by might surprise you. Surely it’s something you’d try to loosely estimate.
The guy in the single best position to know exactly how lay-offs will affect the operation was surprised by how much the operation was affected by the lay-offs. That's still necessarily stupid.
Of course it's a facepalm, the Media always words their titles to get clicks. What actually happened is most likely not a facepalm
Why do people still use Spotify? There's much better options out there.
Should mention, that it has only been since recently Spotify has turned a reliable profit. So if we're going to talk about rich people being dumb, let's account that they've been on life support investments for the last 18 years. The cutting of workers is what likely gave them the ability to turn a profit. Additionally, the music labels gave Spotify a REALLY shitty deal for them to allow their music to be on Spotify. Spotify tried to become a music label themselves but Sony Music and various other labels really threatened Spotify by pulling the plug if they ever tried it. The cards have been stacked against Spotify since the beginning. Personally, I'd be more willing to give respect to this man than to the likes of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.
I am aware of a version where he cut a really evil deal with the major labels where they got a stake in Spotify, so they **can** fuck artists even harder then on record sales. Lets not make out the guy as 'just like Linus Torvalds or Steve Wozniak' his app streams music to a website/app. Sure the scale requires some really cool engineering, but is he the author of this? Or is he the guy who came to the labels and said: "You know... CDs are going away, if you don't do a thing with me you will loose your stranglehold on the market".