2023-06-05 16:08:18
Spotify will carry out another round of layoffs that will affect around 200 employees on the podcast team. The cuts are part of a “corporate reorganization” of the audio streaming giant.
- The company plans to merge its subsidiaries, Parcast and Gimlet Studios into a single division.
- In a statement, Sashar Elhabashi, head of Spotify’s podcast division, said the company would make changes that would lead to a 2% reduction in the workforce.
- Affected employees have already started receiving an invitation to speak with HR.
- The company promises “generous severance packages”, health coverage and access to outplacement support.
Earlier this year, the company also announced the layoffs of 600 employees, about 6% of its workforce.
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We are expanding our efforts to partner with top podcasters around the world with a personalized approach optimized for each show and creator. This fundamental pivot of a more uniform proposition will allow us to better support the creator community.
However, doing so requires adaptation; Over the past few months, our senior leadership team has worked closely with HR to determine the ideal organization for this next chapter. As a result, we made the difficult but necessary decision to strategically realign our group and reduce our global podcast vertical and other functions by approximately 200 people, or 2% of Spotify’s workforce.
Sashar Elhabashi, head of Spotify’s podcast division, in a statement.
Parcast and Gimlet Media were purchased by Spotify in 2019 when the company began investing heavily in the podcasts and exclusive content segment.
Spotify spent $56 million to buy Parcast and $200 million to buy Gimlet Media.
How is Spotify’s podcast business going?
In the same announcement of layoffs, the company released some results about its podcast business. According to Elhabashi, Spotify has 100 million podcast listeners and around 5 million shows.
Ad revenue for streaming podcasts saw “double-digit growth from 2021 to 2022”.
Sashar Elhabashi, explained the next steps of the sector’s future strategy:
Given these learnings and our leadership position, we recently embarked on the next phase of our podcast strategy, which is focused on delivering even more value to creators (and users!).
This starts with maximizing consumption from the mass audience we’ve established through format innovation and ensuring that more creators in more places succeed.
With information from TechCrunch.
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