Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrbonner | Hacker News Reader

I didn’t know they have that many people (9000) to work for a single product. I’ve been a subscriber for more than 5 years and the app on the iPhone just gets worse everyday. Why?

- daily updates is gone. This is where I can get a snapshot of all new releases from artists I love. I’m not sure if Release Calendar is the new one but I don’t bother to check.

- I listen to classical and the song title naming is just subpar. For example, “Well-tempered Clavier, Book 1, J.S Bach, Angela Hewitt, Prelude in C Major is too long to be in the title. Especially, the rat if the album is just a repeat alternate between prelude or fugue and the chord.

- recently play list stopped syncing between my phone and my desktop app after 2022 for some reason. Is it a bug or they just stop doing this since it costs more to sync?

I probably won’t switch to a different stream service for now as there is not much differences for me to migrate.

View on HN

Every damned time this happens someone asks how it's possible they have so many employees when it's just an app... Spotify owns multiple large podcast studios, has sales people, negotiators, music industry people, lawyers, facility staff, lawyers, marketing, content curators. It is the business engine through which the vast majority of the world consumes music these days. You can quibble about if they have too many engineering employees, but at least get the real number first.

This seems false, Whatsapp became 'the business engine through which the vast majority of the world' sends texts on the backs of 20ish employees.

Even assuming delivering music, podcasts, royalty payments, negotiations with artists, etc..., takes 100x more headcount in total, that should still be only around 2000 employees.

9000 just means most are not being that productive.

Obviously you can do it leaner, if they couldn't they wouldn't be firing people. My point is that you shouldn't be trying to estimate based on the technical side when most of the head count is negotiating with record companies and producing podcasts. In any case I personally wouldn't be so obsessed with every company running as lean as possible, great way to have 5 people make 10 billion dollars and everyone else just gets to pound sand. In a healthy society companies should run fat to keep people employed, engaged, trained up, ready to fill in as a replacement, and lots and lots of vacation time.

> ...when most of the head count is negotiating with record companies and producing podcasts.

Can you link the source?

It does sound extreme doesn’t it!

But I wonder if they have to replicate non-dev teams in multiple countries?

I’d imagine they have to a seperate legal, promotional, marketing, sales and so on teams for each market.

Replicating these business functions quickly adds up to thousands of people employed!

As an English speaker I tend to think of music as being all in English, but each region has its own musical culture that would need addressing.

France I believe mandates a certain amount of French speaking songs.

Apples and Oranges, not from a complexity perspective but WA was majorly subsidized by VC and later FB without monetization for years.

Spotify has a completely different business model, architecture etc.

agreed. the population has probably passed an inflection point where bureaucracy is at its peak, crosscutting concerns are unavoidable, and communication chains too long and winding to be considered communication at all. but we’re talking of the genetrix of some of the modern modes of organizing work and workers. i'm more hopeful that they’ll be able to do the right thing, even if it doesn’t mean reducing workforce to the irreducible minimum.

Spotify's issues and costs are royalty payments. Of the €567 million increase in cost of revenue for the Nine months ended September 30, 2023, higher royalty costs were €534 million of that total. (~94%) [1] This delta is vs 7,159 total cost of revenue on 9,576 of revenue (€millions).[1, pg4] From looking at the rest of the report, most other cost of revenue contributors are minor (5 here, 10 there).

In the total category, R&D (1,257), S&M (1,101), G&A (430). R&D trending up, possibly plateauing, S&M, G&A trending down. [1, pg4] All relatively minor compared to 7,159. (<=1/6)

[1] pg 36, Spotify 2023 Financial Report, "Spotify Technology S.A.", FORM 6-K, October, 2023 - https://s29.q4cdn.com/175625835/files/doc_financials/2023/q3...

R&D increased as a % of revenue YOY. I think the increased cost of revenue is part of the story, the other being salaries and benefits rolling up to R&D

The R&D expense is fully within their control, while things are a bit more complex with licensing costs.

If Spotify is struggling to pay royalties they can make their own music

If you primarily listen to classical music, Apple's new Classical Music app (part of its Music subscription) is *fantastic*.

What's not fantastic is apple's lock down of their ecosystem. I'm not paying for some lacking android app by Apple.

The screenshots in the Play Store make it seem like the same app I see in iOS.

anecdotal, I have the apple family plan and my partner has no problems with the apple music app on her android—we’ve been on it for a couple years.

i’ve used her phone to control music on long car trips, if there are differences i haven’t noticed. again, anecdotal.

another nice option is Qobuz, the sound quality is good for the newer releases.

The UI was one step below Spotify or Apple the last time I tried it though.

It's noticeable that they're working with a much much smaller team than their competitors, and they occasionally roll out new bugs. On the other hand, they seem really dedicated and listen to the users. I've switched to Qobuz about five years ago and while I've had the occasional issue, I don't plan to move away from it. I usually get a personal reply to my bug reports (usually from the same guy -> small team! :D) and that tends to make me much more willing to support a company.

I was using Apple Classical happily for ~1 month, then it stopped working. It would load all the metadata and let me browse around but when trying to play a song it wouldn't progress.

I restarted my phone, reinstalled the app, went through several iterations of iOS updating, the problem never went away. No other app, including Spotify, has this issue on my phone. After a month of paying for Apple Music without Classical working I shrugged and unsubscribed. Big loss for me, and for them, since I am exactly their target audience with Apple Classical.

FYI, you can contact Apple technical support pretty easily. I have been able to talk to a real person quickly a few times over the years.

https://support.apple.com/contact

Does any other brand have something similar to Apple's support? I was kinda surprised to see that you could get called back as easily as I did. Or that their stores could quickly fix e.g. a bricked bootloader. The Windows/Android devices I had before had nothing like that.

I don't know, but it's definitely keeping me on board. I don't even call generally, I just text.

I am quite steeped in the Apple ecosystem, but Apple's crude syncing behaviors and runaway AMPLibraryAgent bugs/invasiveness, has me quarantining Apple media software. Use of Spotify does not mangle my private music library.

Always nice to see Apple Music Classical mentioned on here. I was one of the lead engineers building things before the acquisition and to my knowledge they still use tooling I built around automation of audio ingestion. Streaming music was a fascinating industry to work in

Really? I didn't know Apple has a dedicated streaming app for classical now. Will check it out. Thanks

Also not fantastic, how Apple handles multiple devices. I forgot how they call it, but registering new devices is a pain, especially if you have multiple Macbooks, iPads, iPhone, there’s an edge case where you have to wait 90 days before it starts streaming to your brand new iPhone. You better reach out to their support, where they never acknowledge the issue but always fix it in 5 minutes.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250348779

The feature I miss that spotify has is being able to control music playing on my desktop from my phone or vice versa

Yeah, Apple has a remote app but you need to be on the same local network and connect to the remote library and then can't add stuff from Apple Music. It all feels so antiquated and inelegant.

Some people are complaining about Spotify UI/UX but at least they provide a lot of features and it works pretty well most of the time. I find the app more responsive and just overall better has a streaming player.

I subscribed to apple music for 5 years but then I just switched back to Spotify this year. It is just better.

That's the thing I loved most about Spotify. Unfortunately their "radio" sucks. It generates a 1 time playlist of 50 songs. Pandora has the shittiest interfaces ever, but it does a damn good job DJing for me. Most of the time, I just want to turn it on, pick a genre and let it go. I don't want to listen to the same 50 songs over and over in the same order.

I think that beyond some relatively small number, engineering headcount functions as a demonstration of wealth - it doesn't actually make the product better, it doesn't make you ship faster (Brooks's law). but it makes you look big and important and justifies your market cap

Sales scales as O(N), eng/product should scale at sqrt or log. Ideally, obviously.

I want to like this theory, and it seems like there is some social clout aspect to the phenomenon.

But, the bump these companies get in the stock market whenever they do a round of layoffs indicates the market cap is justified by what you would expect.

Exactly. VCs want to see growth by watching double the engineering headcount on every subsequent visit. It's ALL about optics and burning money for show. But the party is ending.

I have seen it first-hand - company opening a new floor to show growth, but it was half-empty.

They are laying off people this week.

> recently play list stopped syncing between my phone and my desktop app after 2022 for some reason. Is it a bug or they just stop doing this since it costs more to sync?

I thought this was just me. Defo a bug.

It's very much more than supporting 'one product'. Off the top of my head, regarding engineering, I can think of:

1. iOS App 2. Android App 3. Windows App 4. Microsoft App 5. Web App 6. Underlying API 7. Artist Portal/App 8. Advertising Portal/App 9. PlayStation App 10. Xbox App

There are probably entire engineering teams for each micro-service in the overall product (personalization, playlists, player, etc.).

They have Spotify apps on everything: Garmin watches, Roku TVs, the "Car Thing", Amazon Echo, Facebook Portal, Discord, Bixby...

That's a lot of apps to maintain and keep up to date with the latest features.

They used to have Soundtrap, which is a DAW in the browser and had two separate apps. They sold it back to the founders AFAIK.

Not to mention them killing playlist radio functionality, which was a great way to have a custom Pandora-like experience whose seed you could control.

> I didn’t know they have that many people (9000) to work for a single product.

Having had a wee insight into how it worked at Rdio (obligatory: I miss Rdio!), one big chunk of the answer is they need a literal army of lawyers.

A worldwide streaming music library is a hoard of licensing liabilities for every possible country, with deals that expire, renew and change hands daily on every possible mix of business days and holiday calendars.

As for the design and development headcount, I guess they dispatch teams and tasks as efficiently as Meta with their thousands of acqui-hired product people.

Everyone misses Rdio.

They keep changing the design of the app for the worse, just nonsensical stuff. Like how many UX design people do they have? Cause clearly they're just changing stuff to make themselves feel useful. The heart changing to a plus, what the fuck Spotify?

> they have that many people (9000) ... just gets worse everyday

As much as I hate to see layoffs from an empathization perspective, maybe this is the reason? Remember Brook's Law - adding manpower to a late project makes it later. Too many cooks spoil the broth and all that.

It's called "maximizing profit" "for the shareholders" by "saving money".

They consider their workforce a liability and expense instead of an investment and necessary for quality and competitiveness.

They're just cutting into their workforce to impress investors to bilk more money out of them.

It's a sick philosophy for short-term gain that will ultimately destroy the company.

Check out Idagio for classical. No affiliation.

I can reccomend deezer. I switched away from spotify last year and ended up trying like 5 different options before settling on deezer. No complaints, great quality streams (lossless), can upload your own songs and their recommendations system is really good.

It's hundreds of "microservices". That's why they created Backstage.

You just need that many people if you are going to go that route. Unfortunately for them, once the economy goes from "stupid good" to "very good", it all starts falling apart.

It's unchecked complexity that at some point is going to destroy you.

And it can literally destroy them.

"From Unicorns to Zombies: Tech Start-Ups Run Out of Time and Money"

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/07/technology/tech-startups-...

> I didn’t know they have that many people (9000) to work for a single product.

I would presume it's many more products than just Spotify app.

I count not open the app on my phone because the timezone reported by my carries was not compatible

For me it’s the forcing of Podcasts down my throat that I hate.

No Spotify, I do not want to listen to Joe Rogan and other right wing podcasts.

Just let me hide Podcasts already :-(

Spotify without podcasts would be delightful

I don't care what American "wing" they are, I don't want podcasts and don't appreciate getting ads for them on the "ad-free" service I pay for.

I may be in the minority here but I still enjoy the Joe Rogan Experience. As an avid listener the past 12 years I can tell you he is not "right wing" in any way. He was a liberal and believes the left "left him behind" when progressivism hijacked the democratic party. Most intellectually honest humans agree with him.

I stand corrected :-)

Seems I unfairly bundled him in with online 'Right Wing' movement.

He does have a certain reputation though in some quarters :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com