Spotify to join Google, Amazon, and Microsoft in layoffs to reduce costs

Another big tech company, Spotify Technology is planning layoffs in an effort to cut costs. The company might announce the layoffs as early as this week, according to a report by Bloomberg.

The company laid off 38 people from its Gimlet Media and Parcast podcast studios in October, as well as podcast editorial employees in September, and now it’s planning to do more layoffs, but the number of job cuts is not specified.

According to the third-quarter earnings report of Spotify, the music-streaming giant currently has about 9,800 employees. Additionally, Spotify has made a big investment in podcasting since 2019, spending over a billion dollars on acquisitions and rights to popular shows, but the investments have yet to show returns and the shares have tumbled 66 per cent last year. Spotify executives said in June that the podcast business would become profitable in the next one to two years.

The wave of layoffs in tech
Spotify is not the first and may not even be the last to lay off employees in the tech industry. Even some of the industry giants that are highly profitable are trimming their workforce to cut down spending. Late last week, Google announced that it is laying off 6 per cent of its employees, which accounts for 12,000 employees across geographies. Amazon also announced a reduction of 18,000 employees from its workforce.

Meta, the parent company of social media platform Facebook also laid off 11,000 employees in November last year. That accounted for 13 per cent of the entire workforce the company has in different locations. Twitter was one of the first companies to start laying off employees. Musk recently revealed that Twitter is left with 2,300 employees which are 70 per cent lesser than the number of people employed before the Musk takeover. Twitter had 7,500 employees before layoffs. Business Today