Music streaming firm Spotify Technology will lay off about 6 percent of its staff, roughly 600 jobs, joining a slew of technology companies from Amazon to Meta Platforms in announcing job cuts to lower costs, reports said.
Spotify laid off 38 staff from its Gimlet Media and Parcast podcast studios in October. The music-streaming giant has about 9,800 employees, according to its third-quarter earnings report. It also has an Irish operation, and bought Mark Little’s Kinzen in October last year, The Irish Times reports.
“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,” chief executive Danial Ek said in an email to staff published on Spotify’s website. “In hindsight, I was too ambitious in investing ahead of our revenue growth. And for this reason, today, we are reducing our employee base by about 6 per cent across the company,” the report said.
Ek cited Spotify’s operating expenditure growth as more than twice its revenue growth in 2022 as among the reasons for the cuts.
The company, according to Reuters, also said its chief content and advertising business officer, Dawn Ostroff, will depart as part of a broader reorganization.
Spotify, which had about 9,800 full-time employees as of September 30, said it expects to incur about 35 million euros ($38.06 million) to 45 million euros in severance-related charges, the news agency added.
Shares in the company rose 3.5% in premarket trading.
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