Spotify CEO Daniel Ek surprised by how much laying off 1,500 employees negatively affected the streaming giant’s operations

This is what the pharma giant, Bayer is trying right now kinda. They just told everyone to manage themselves.

It's that or they think they can simply replace people with AI and call it good

“People are PEOPLE? That’s not what I wanna hear…”

We refer to them as "human capital"

Not this guy!

There are a lot of smart hardworking CEOs. But none of them ever seem to get to this level. At some line in the sand CEOs just become idiots playing chess (poorly) from their yachts.

Good leaders that care about their company seem to universally get pushed out at IPO.

The CEO is just a position that tells everyone that you've lied to people, deceived your close ones, pulled off underhanded tactics and more to get to where you are. Now you're the top of the level shithead who makes money doing fuck all except write or say things for PR clout.

At that level of wealth, concepts such as meritocracy (if ever it's a positive term) are meaningless; let us still tell the fairy tale that capitalism rewards the best of us and not the recommended.

People tend to hero worship others who don't deserve to be.

You do have to be hard working to be CEO, there's just a ton of stuff that needs to be handled around a company at all times. But they are not uniquely smarter or have better decision making skills than other people. A good CEO will understand that they don't know everything and surround themselves with experts to help them with decision making instead of thinking they know better.

That's not to say that workers aren't necessarily equally as hard working, especially when your asshole CEO fires a ton of your coworkers and expects you to pick up the slack.

Who's doing that? The only people doing that to the CEOs everyone else knows they're useless.

I absolutely love Tidal as well. Was a long time Spotify subscriber, but their UI/UX decisions, especially for their desktop client, finally frustrated me enough to switch. Had almost no issues moving my playlists over, have a shuffle which actually shuffles, still have daily recommendation playlists, and my favorite part -patch notes; I know what's happening and why. They actually listen to user feedback and make updates based on it.

I saw Spotify sent out an email for another fee hike yesterday. When I opened the app, it was showing me some garbage for an AI playlist generator and the email mentioned they needed more money to pay for amazing new features, the new AI system was no better than the previous system so I figured wtf do they need it for.

After 15 years of being a paid member, I’m going to wrap it up and go back to piracy.

I've been using Tidal for a long time, and it has only gotten better.

They recently upgraded all tiers to high quality (better than CD) quality for free.

Meanwhile Spotify still doesn't have the high quality audio tier they promised a few years ago.

I dropped Spotify during that whole Joe Rogan thing but I had been a long time subscriber. I moved to Apple Music which is super buggy and has what appears to be zero interest in playing music I actually like. From your comment, I’ll give Tidal a shot.

Does Tidal let family members live at different addresses or do they restrict a family to one house?

Switched to tidal as got fedup with Spotify shit app quality, constant breaking when usieng Android auto, and glitching out when playing between pc/android. Tidal is better but missing things. My wife loves alexa integration..so she sticking with Spotify. I am enjoying tidal though. It just works evey time. Its clear why it stops playinga song, and so on. I would rather miss featurs then use buggy product. Spotify is full of random featurs and crap but its buggier then ever...

One other stark difference is the qulaity of of mixes and radio stations tidal puts together..spotify plays same stuff on loop basically, i rarely got anything good thats new and not promoted artist...with tidal i get a huge mix of artists in mymixes and radios, both new and old stuff..its been better for discovery then Spotify.

Just took a look at their pricing. Immediately comparable with Spotify (same price for both individual and family). Looks like I'm trying a new streaming service!

Odd that it says $10.99 for individual plan on the website but $12.99 when you download the app.

If i wasn't getting spotify premium for free then I'd seriously look into getting Tidal.

I have been using and will continue to use Pandora. I pay five bucks a month for no commercials it continually sends me music that I like to listen to and I have had little to no problems with it since I first signed up. While currently everyone I know who uses Spotify does nothing but complain about how their playlists keep playing them stuff they don't want or have previously disliked.

I feel for whatever engineer exactly followed management/legal orders to create that.

A leopard are his own face

On the contrary, I think the CEO knows exactly what his job is: go there and make money for himself and his friends. Whatever happens to the company in the future is the future CEO's problem.

Actually that’s a really good point. Apart from any glaring ethical concerns one might have about this kind of thing, it’s not a terribly good way to run a business. Man do these folk ever like finding a nice new way to shoot themselves in the foot 🤦‍♂️

Yup I canceled my sub when they went exclusive with Joe Rogan. I'm not spending a penny to support that douche canoe.

For real. I’ve been having issues with playlists loading correctly especially in Car mode. It made my likes unusable for a week.

Pay your employees! I know you can afford to fix issues.

Enshittification in action

Not really because it's not like they are handing that contract to him out of charity, they know he is a huge draw and so if they don't keep him on, they lose subscribers (and not growing enough was the reason they gave for the layoffs, so losing subscribers because they lose Joe rogan would only exacerbate the reasons for the layoffs).

But I understand that this is about virtual signalling the safe opinion that you hate Joe rogan, and has nothing to do with critically thinking about this.

what music don't they have that you're after??? i dont think i've ever NOT found something i was looking for on Spotify.

Anyone know a good service I can switch to instead? (Besides fkn youtube services?)

Wouldn't call them a monopoly, at least not for music as there are alternatives.

They actually offer an inferior platform compared to other music streaming services. You can get way more stuff on SoundCloud for a similar price, or way better audio quality on Deezer or Amazon/Apple music, for a mark up. It's honesty kindaastonishing just his popular Spotify is compared to what they offer...

Spotify made almost 4 billion dollars last year. I wouldn't call that no money. I agree with everything else though.

It’s an app for finding your dog.

Yeah it’s one of those color bleach pens you use to get coffee stains out, no source.

I've just used modded Spotify clients that give me premium for free for a long while now. Not sure if iPhones have an option like this, but there is an option on both Android and Windows.

I just use YouTube. It has pretty much all the music I want and a lot more that I don't.

i've just been using the "audio file" strategy for the last few years.

No fuss, no problems, only my idiocy and shenanigans cause problems. It's great. Sometimes metadata is just bunk though, that's kind of annoying.

It takes a village to run a global highly available service for hundreds of millions of users.

Hey at least this guy is asking, make him the CEO