Stable means no massive new product lines, growth, etc.
Spotify is what it is. An app across a handful platforms, streaming infrastructure, and a legal/purchasing dept for music rights.
Does this need 7000 people? Zero chance. Is it 1000? 700? 250? No ones knows yet, but everyone remembers WhatsApp at acquisition and watches Twitter to kind of continue without 80% of its former employee base.
For example, if FB never invested in ML they would have had even larger margins (fewer GPUs and ML engineers), but now that investment may pay off by fending off tiktok through copycat products and also rebuilding ad attribution after ATT. To complicate matters, before it happens, you don't know in what area your competitor will arise (ML? Product? Paradigm shift?). Similar examples with Google vs. OpenAI, ~2010s Kubernetes wars between cloud providers, Snap vs. FB/Twitter, etc.
Do you need endless hanger ons in HR, PR, all kinds of non-producing departments?
Crappy CEOs, which is not the same as a crappy founder, have grown companies without any sense and purpose. Daniel is a great founder and rode great luck. But, he should have been replaced with a Eric Schmidt operator figure a while ago.
I think the founder clings to company forever is coming to an end, in most cases going public should mean a new CEO.
We are really privileged to be in such an industry, gaining so much money (depending on location) compared to other professions and doing so meaningless job. IMO the majority of saas business would operate decently with at least half of their staff or they shouldn’t exist at all. Most of them just facilitate invented features for other saas anyway.
I would imagine this is where the majority of their staff are. Spotify’s catalog is huge, and record labels are constantly renegotiating extremely granular contracts with the streaming services (i.e. at the individual song level). For example, I’ve seen particular songs on albums disappear for a few weeks (the rest of the album can still be played), then mysteriously return (or not), all because of some cryptic licensing shift from the record label. There is no easy way to automate this; a human interaction must occur between the label and streaming service every time a weird licensing shift causes a particular song/album/artist to be removed. Given the size of Spotify’s catalog, there are probably thousands of such licensing changes each day.