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Only a few months after saying a significant wave of layoffs, Spotify plans to conduct one other spherical of layoffs. This time, the job cuts will have an effect on the podcast division as a part of a company reorganization. Particularly, the corporate plans to merge Parcast and Gimlet Studios.
In an inside memo, Sahar Elhabashi, Spotify’s head of the podcast division, announced that the corporate was making adjustments that might result in a workforce discount of two%. This alteration will have an effect on round 200 jobs and people who are impacted have already acquired an invite to speak with somebody from the HR division.
“We’re increasing our partnership efforts with main podcasters from throughout the globe with a tailor-made method optimized for every present and creator. This elementary pivot from a extra uniform proposition will permit us to help the creator neighborhood higher,” Elhabashi wrote.
“Nonetheless, doing so requires adapting; over the previous few months, our senior management staff has labored intently with HR to find out the optimum group for this subsequent chapter. Because of this, we’ve made the troublesome however crucial choice to make a strategic realignment of our group and scale back our international podcast vertical and different features by roughly 200 folks, or 2% of Spotify’s workforce,” she continued.
Spotify guarantees that workers who’re affected by the layoffs will get “beneficiant severance packages, together with prolonged Healthcare protection and speedy entry to outplacement help.”
In 2019, Spotify made an enormous wager on podcasts, and on unique content material particularly. The corporate acquired some in style podcast networks, corresponding to Parcast and Gimlet Media. This transfer into first-party content material was an costly one as the corporate spent around $200 million for Gimlet Media and $56 million for Parcast.
However the firm is now scaling again this unique content material technique. Proof of this lies within the mixture of Parcast and Gimlet into Spotify Studios. In her memo, Sahar Elhabashi names among the podcasts which might be nonetheless actively developed, corresponding to ‘Stolen’, ‘The Journal’, ‘Science Vs’, ‘Heavyweight’, ‘Serial Killers’, and ‘Conspiracy Theories’.
And in the event you’re questioning about The Ringer, one other content material firm that was acquired by Spotify, it should stay a separate enterprise unit from Spotify Studios. The Ringer has been primarily targeted on sports activities protection, but it surely additionally covers popular culture and extra.
As a part of this announcement, Spotify shared some metrics about its podcast enterprise. The corporate says that there at the moment are 100 million podcast listeners on Spotify throughout 5 million exhibits. Podcast advert income has additionally skilled “excessive double-digit progress” from 2021 to 2022.
“Given these learnings and our management place, we just lately launched into the subsequent section of our podcast technique, which is targeted on delivering much more worth for creators (and customers!),” Elhabashi wrote in her memo. “This begins with maximizing consumption from the huge viewers we’ve established by format innovation and guaranteeing that extra creators in additional locations obtain success.”
Final 12 months, Spotify canceled 11 unique podcasts and laid off a few of its podcast employees. The corporate most certainly selected to cancel underperforming exhibits with the intention to give attention to hits and make room for some new exhibits. Right this moment’s transfer is extra important and it might result in essential adjustments in Spotify’s unique content material technique within the coming months.
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