[saaaaaam]

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.