Spotify fires 200 employees of the podcast department

O Spotify is laying off 200 employees from its podcast department, totaling 2% of the audio streaming company’s global workforce.

In a note released at this second fair (5), the company based in Sweden said that “it made a difficult decision, more necessary, to make a strategic realignment” in its podcast department, including the merger of two studios Parcast and Gimlet Media in um only Bill Simmons’ sports podcast, “The Ringer,” will remain separate.

“We are expanding our partnership efforts with leading podcasters from around the world with a personalized approach optimized for each show and breeder,” wrote Sahar Elhabashi, vice president of Spotify, in a note. “This fundamental pivot of a more uniform proposal will allow us to better support the breeding community.”

O Spotify bet a lot on podcasts in recent years. In 2019, redesenhou the application to emphasize the spending of more than US$ 500 million in podcast producing studios. She also produces several exclusive podcasts, such as “The Joe Rogan Experience” and Alex Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy” podcast.

No entanto, the company has reduced the number of exclusivities that it possesses. The agreements with self-help guru Brené Brown, sports journalist Jemele Hill and the agreements with Barack and Michelle Obama are expiring.

The Spotify says that it has 100 million listeners and is the number one platform for podcasts in the United States. The growing company that receives ads for these types of content “experimented a double-digit growth” between 2021 and 2022.

This is the second round of demissões do Spotify this year. In January, about 6% of its global workforce was cut due to a slowdown in advertising spending.

“Like many other leaders, I hoped to support the strong winds favored by the pandemic and proved that our large global businesses and lower risk of the impact of a slowdown announced to us would isolate us. In retrospect, I was very ambitious in investing before the growth of our revenues”, says CEO Daniel Ek at the time.

A notable waiver during this was Dawn Ostroff, its content director, who signed several podcasting contracts during her short tenure.