Spotify has announced that it, too, will lay off a significant portion of its workforce.
The company said Monday that it plans to cut six percent of its staff – approximately 600 of its approximately 9,800 employees.
Among those who are leaving is Content and Advertising Director Dawn Ostroff, according to a report by The Verge. Ostroff was involved in growing the company’s podcasting business.
“Over the last few months, we’ve made a considerable effort to rein in costs but it simply hasn’t been enough,” Spotify CEO Daniel Ek wrote in a blog post.
“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,” Ek wrote. “In hindsight, I was too ambitious in investing ahead of our revenue growth.
“I take full responsibility for the moves that got us here today,” he added.
Those staff who are being cut are to receive severance pay of approximately five months’ salary, during which time the company said it would continue to pay for healthcare.
In making the cuts, Spotify – the world’s largest music streaming service – joined the parade of other high-profile firms that have announced major layoffs in recent days, among them Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta.
Thus far in 2023 – a period of just three weeks – more than 46,000 employees at US-based tech companies have been laid off, according to a Crunchbase News survey.
Included in that number are the 10,000 employees laid off by Microsoft and the 12,000 staff members laid off by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, as well as some 18,000 roles eliminated at Amazon. The figure includes impending layoffs announced in November. The majority of roles to be cut are in Amazon Stores and People Experience and Technology Solutions teams, according to an email sent to employees from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.
In addition, the cryptocurrency trading platform Coinbase announced on January 10 it will lay off 950 people in a statement from CEO Brian Armstrong, and Vox Media’s union wrote in a January 20 statement on Twitter, “We were informed today that the company is laying off around seven percent of its workforce.”
Last year, more than 107,000 jobs were slashed from public and private tech companies in the United States alone.
