I would have guessed a total headcount of 2K-3K. Anybody has an idea of the approximate headcount by department ? 10K full time employees seem a lot to me.
There's likely a whole org working on integrations with some oddball apps and devices. They likely make millions from this edge use case since Spotify operates at such scale. There's likely an org that makes small 0.1% improvements to server infra that saves millions. Every possible edge case bug is being hit at their scale. It's worth having extra engineers to tackle those.
Not to mention the shear business complexity of what they do. Billing, paying royalties, advertisers, legal compliance etc.
10k employees. For a huge company that operates across the globe. That seems small.
Thanks, that was also my guess. Would be interesting to know headcount by department. Hence my question.
They already invested hundreds of millions on Joe Rogan and can't even develop a half-decent podcast interface.
Maybe they could improve on that front and diversify a bit?
It paid 200m of a 3.5 year deal announced May 2020 in a single quarter?
None of that adds up.
In which direction?
I could imagine taking a Netflix-style approach perhaps, where you fund small-ish podcast producers and see what sticks. Perhaps develop a podcast-specific UI mode. Maybe create a monetization platform for podcasts (similar to Substack) so that you can attract talent and then extract the all-too-familiar XX% in platform fees?
I mean, I'm sure Spotify employees have thought of these things before, it's not like these ideas are revolutionary. But I see nothing that makes my Spotify subscription a must-have.
Also podcasts were offline by design, I know times change, but still it’s too early…