> I'd expect that to be a non-trivial, not-automatable business critical task that requires lots of bodies.
From my brief but traumatising stints working with companies dealing with music, yes, it is a clusterfuck of nonsense that requires industry knowledge, contacts, etc. and only parts of it are amenable to automation (not the important bits, either.)
Spotify (surprisingly) doesn’t deal with many artists or labels directly, and music is delivered against an industry-code schema that contains all the metadata (ok, most of the metadata) needed to attribute usage and route payments.
That happens via a bunch of intermediary aggregators/distributors and a decent part of this automated/automatable.
As I understand it a lot of the staffing overhead at Spotify is in product and marketing - and R&D efforts for retention/acquisition. It also seems like these were a lot of the folk laid off which then impacts growth/retention.
From my brief but traumatising stints working with companies dealing with music, yes, it is a clusterfuck of nonsense that requires industry knowledge, contacts, etc. and only parts of it are amenable to automation (not the important bits, either.)