• abhibeckert@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    IMO shareholders should be livid

    Why? Shareholders gave Spotify billions of dollars - they expect the company to spend that money. Shareholders are quite capable of depositing their own money in a bank if they didn’t want it to be spent.

    My take is Spotify hired over 5,000 employees over 2020 and 2021 when the economy looked great. Then Russia Invaded Ukraine in 2022 screwing the global economy and particularly Europe which is Spotify’s biggest market. They’ve laid off about half the people they hired, which is unfortunate… but it’s understandable. The couldn’t have foreseen the economic shift.

    Spotify removed the need for mp3’s for the majority of people, largely killing iTunes

    Huh? Apple’s music service has about a hundred million users. Up from eighty million a few years ago. Spotify has more than twice that, but iTunes is hardly dead.

    • squidman64@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Apple Music the music subscription service is different from iTunes the music purchasing store. When’s the last time you heard of anyone buying an individual song / album on iTunes?

      • olmec@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        I still buy music on iTunes. I prefer having my collection available on CD, but if I only want a single track or two, I just go to iTunes and buy the songs. This year, I think I bought 4 songs. It isn’t ton, but it is still in my mind.

      • 1371113@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        When’s the last time you heard of anyone buying an individual song / album on iTunes?

        I’m yet to hear a first time, and I remember when mp3s first became a thing.

              • 𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒏@lemmy.one
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                11 months ago

                It was purchased by Epic Games a year ago, who recently sold it to Songtradr, a licensing platform for background/‘mood’ music. Songtradr only retained 50% of existing Bandcamp staff (the rest were laid off a few weeks after the sale AFAICT, with the worst affected departments including Bandcamp’s editorial team and customer support. Epic Games handled the severance package, for some reason.)

                People are pretty upset about the editorial team being laid off because it provided exposure for smaller/niche artists in a weekly publication. I’ve never checked it out personally checked it out because I never knew it existed - wishing I had now

                Such a large layoff so quickly by the new owner feels like a sign of darker times ahead for Bandcamp IMO, seeing that it’s apparently been profitable since 2012 (Wayback link, new owners have nuked this from the site?). No need to milk the cow even more when the bucket is full…