[sebdufbeau]

I don't have any hard info, but here's my speculation:

The Spotify most people know (finding and playing songs, creating playlists, recommendations), which obviously very important, is probably a tiny fraction of the complexity for the company.

I would wager the vast majority of the employees at Spotify are working on everything else needed to enable the above. The artists portal, analytics and royalties, paying the labels, paying the artists, legal for every country, etc.

Someone who knows could probably elaborate more than me on everything needed to run a company like that.

Does that require 8000 people? Debatable, but it's certainly more complex than clicking a song and playing it.

EDIT: A quick glimpse at job listing for Spotify on LinkedIn shows:

* Client Partner in India

* Business Operations in Nigeria

* Creator Partner Manager in Mexico

* Artist & Partnerships Manager in Egypt

* NLP Research Scientist in the USA

* Director of Sales in Singapore

[Closi]

Well you are right - Spotify operates in 184 markets, so even if you only had a small 10 person team for each country handling sales/marketing/support/localisation, that's already c2000 employees before you start on anything else.

Remember Spotify has approx. the same number of premium subscribers as Netflix has subscribers, so it's not exactly tiny.

[pie420]

Monaco, Syria, North Korea, Lithuania don't need 10 person teams. It's this napkin math that causes tech companies to inflate. I'm sure Spotify execs did the same math and told HR "Hire 10 people per country, thx".

In the Age of AI, even before 2023 and ChatGPT, localization is a very automatable+contractor heavy job that is very easy to complete. All of africa might need 3-4 teams of 20 people total, and that's including sales/marketing. Maybe double for South America.

The reason tech companies have expanded so much is it looks better when an 8000 employee company controls the worlds music than when an 800 person company does. Same with Google, Facebook, AirBnB, Netflix, etc. The tech monopolies want to make they monopolies seem less ridiculous to regulators.

[Closi]

80 people to manage African countries from a finance, sales, marketing, support, legal, localisation and licensing perspective for a company the scale of Spotify is way too light.

Localisation isn’t just about language - consider payment requirements, legal and regulatory specific challenges, pricing strategy, regional licensing, there might be specific features required to support low bandwidth (eg carrier agreements), if you want to ad-support like Spotify you will need a team to sell ads… it’s hardly a chatgpt + few contractors job.

[yobbo]

> monopolies seem less ridiculous to regulators.

No.

Over-hiring is probably the same everywhere. When "times are good", everyone in the organisation wants to hire because their number of subordinates makes them seem more important and accomplished.

[nikanj]

Spotify makes money from record labels who pay good sums for a placement on various ”hot new metal”-lists. Managing those deals takes lots of personnel

[piva00]

Include in that list: ingesting content (audio and video), maintaining clients for <N> platforms, strategic partners support. Algorithmical personalisation is also quite important for Spotify's offering, etc.