At every company I've worked at, there are things we want to do that nearly everybody think are a good idea. But we can't do them all, because we have limited capital. So we have to be very strategic.
Spotify has developed a huge surface area, because they are attempting to be the one-stop shop for all things audio. The thesis is that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and that's what they're selling to investors. That means there are countless bets they could be making at any one time, to compete with everybody else out there.
For a company of Spotify's stature, when capital is cheap, they can raise the money to do all the things, all at once. They don't have to make prioritization choices. Usually this means many dozens of teams, which each seem pretty lean if you zoom in. Like, I'm guessing there's a team of 3ish developing the in-app lyrics experience, or something like that. The scale is in how many of these bets are going at once.
The capital markets have changed, and now Spotify (like many others) has to constrain its bets. The thesis hasn't changed, but their capacity to try to prove it out isn't as limitless as before.
I don't think the question is whether Spotify should or shouldn't persue podcasts and audiobooks in addition to music streaming.
The question is whether any organization really needs 5-20k tech workers for an audio app. Even one that plays music, podcasts, and books. I would be slack jawed with shock if the Apple team that works on their podcasts app, and the Amazon team that works on their Audible app, COMBINED were a meaningful fraction of that scale.
And it's certainly fair game to question why they don't have more resources allocated to longstanding issues with the core product. Especially given that the core product hasn't noticeably changed much in years.
10000 employees with let's say 40% overhead translates into 2000 3-ish lean teams. Certainly some would be far larger than 3 person but even then. Is Spotify surface that huge really?
Maybe? At Spotify’s scale, those teams would include things like “GCP-friendly audio encoding optimization” or “playlist sharing scalability”. I don’t know enough to estimate what a reasonable size should be (if such an estimation is even possible), but running software for hundreds of millions of users is hard.
Honestly (for someone also working with audio) these team descriptions sound like they would idle most of the time.
My usual yardstick is Apollo programme development team size: about 600 developers. Relatively few tasks are substantially more challenging than writing code that would get people to the Moon and back. There have to be some that are as hard or harder naturally. But when you see a commercial company that has an order of magnitude or two more devs than that, using modern tooling and conveniences, it's hard to fathom.
Not all of the employees are working on the tech side. I can only imagine Spotify has a ton of business operations, sales, legal, etc. It's a worldwide company, too.
And when it comes to product development teams, 3 is pretty minimal. I'm sure most teams have more people than that. I'm simply pointing out that there are a lot of corners of functionality within the platform and one way you can press the gas pedal to accelerate your roadmap is fragmenting areas of concern and forming teams around those fragments. If the conditions for making those bets change, you undo that by consolidating teams, lengthening roadmaps, and downsizing staff (in some order).
I didn't want podcasts, on the other hand I have a few friends who listen to podcasts exclusively on Spotify because they were already listening to music on it.
It might not be a good idea for you, or for me, but there's value on providing it. The churn from adding podcasts was probably low enough to make it worthwhile as a business.
Exclusive podcasts on the other hand seem to have backfired immensely.
People all had a podcast app that worked fine. It was classic embrace/extend/extinguish. It has made many perfectly good paid programs just flat out shut down.
> they are attempting to be the one-stop shop for all things audio
The only problem with that approach is they now have a huge number of half baked or broken features. It's infuriating as hell when you spot a bug or something not working as expected only to find a post on their community dating back close to a decade, with thousands of people confirming the issue and someone from their team repeatedly replying with a vague message about passing it on to the team.
Spotify's development has somehow been run at a snails pace even with their huge headcount.
I'm not defending how Spotify strategizes or delivers. I'm just saying that given their surface area, it's not difficult for me to imagine that a big chunk of the company is running on developing a bunch of parallel efforts.
Spotify has developed a huge surface area, because they are attempting to be the one-stop shop for all things audio. The thesis is that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and that's what they're selling to investors. That means there are countless bets they could be making at any one time, to compete with everybody else out there.
For a company of Spotify's stature, when capital is cheap, they can raise the money to do all the things, all at once. They don't have to make prioritization choices. Usually this means many dozens of teams, which each seem pretty lean if you zoom in. Like, I'm guessing there's a team of 3ish developing the in-app lyrics experience, or something like that. The scale is in how many of these bets are going at once.
The capital markets have changed, and now Spotify (like many others) has to constrain its bets. The thesis hasn't changed, but their capacity to try to prove it out isn't as limitless as before.