Following in the footsteps of other prominent tech companies that have laid off staff over the past few weeks, Spotify announced it would cut 6 percent of its global workforce.
“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,” Spotify CEO Daniel Ek wrote in a memo to employees (reproduced by CNBC).
However, fears of an oncoming recession have led the popular music streamer to take another look at its balance sheets. “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 percent across the company,” Ek’s memo added.
Impacted employees will receive an average of five months’ severance and healthcare coverage. In mid-2022, Spotify announced a hiring slowdown, but predicted that its headcount would nonetheless climb by the end of the year; in the interim, however, the economic situation deteriorated, forcing this new strategy.
Spotify’s announcement comes on the heels of Alphabet (parent company of Google) announcing it would cut 12,000 employees, or roughly 6 percent of its workforce. Over the past few months, Salesforce, Meta, Twitter, Amazon, and numerous startups have also announced employee cutbacks. After the massive spending and lightning-fast hiring of the past few years, executives at these companies now believe it’s time to cut back—and that means shuttering unprofitable units and reducing team sizes.
However, it’s also important to keep in mind that, according to the latest data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the overall tech unemployment rate remains 1.8 percent. “Despite the layoffs there continues to be more employers hiring tech talent than shedding it,” Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA, wrote in a statement accompanying that data. Even as some of the biggest names in tech cut back, companies in many other industries are still hiring tech pros.
