Spotify to cut six per cent of workforce
Spotify has announced plans to cut six per cent of its workforce in the coming months.
Up to 600 employees are set to leave the Sweden-based US-listed music streaming service along with its chief content officer Dawn Ostroff.
Chief executive Daniel Ek wrote in a message to employees that the company was restructuring to promote “speed”.
He added: “While I believe this decision is right for Spotify, I understand that with our historic focus on growth, many of you will view this as a shift in our culture. But as we evolve and grow as a business, so must our way of working while still staying true to our core values.
“As you are well aware, over the last few months we’ve made a considerable effort to rein-in costs, but it simply hasn’t been enough.
“Like many other leaders, I hoped to sustain the strong tailwinds from the pandemic and believed that our broad global business and lower risk to the impact of a slowdown in ads would insulate us. In hindsight, I was too ambitious in investing ahead of our revenue growth.”
The company is expected to take a severance-related charge of between €35million (£30.7m) and €45million (£39.6m).
Spotify had said in October it would slow down hiring for the rest of the year and into 2023.
Meanwhile, Universal Music Group was recently hit with a lawsuit over its Spotify equity ownership relating to hip hip duo Black Sheep.
The duo, comprising Andres Titus and William McLean, have claimed that Universal owes them and other artists approximately $750million (just under £630million) in unpaid royalties.
Black Sheep claim that this is because UMG allegedly agreed to accept lower royalty rates from Spotify in exchange for shares in the streaming service back in 2008
In other Spotify-related news, the streaming platform recently released a new feature called ‘Playlist in a Bottle’ that allows users to create their own music time capsule to open next year.
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Damian Jones
NME
