Each of those should be a team, not a 1k+ person department. A few tens of engineers for dev, the same for QA and DevOps, then maybe a few hundred employees for all the review processes, marketing, relationships with music labels&advertisers, etc.
Discord famously runs (ran) with 50-odd engineers. Silicon Valley’s VC-backed economy is famously terrible with over-highering by orders of magnitude, and since interest rates went up some of those companies realized that maybe they should stop burning so much money.
You have to keep in mind that they operate all over the world. Each country has its own labels and messy negotiations to do. Doing literally anything on a global scale takes a lot of people, no matter what it is, just to navigate the differing business environments.
So we should expect their legalese and marketing departments to be the heaviest staffed then, right?
Mind, I’m not disagreeing with you, you make a very good point. Licensing is arcanely complex, and it’s different for every country. Also makes sense to me that legal and marketing would be significantly impacted by all this.
Almost like you’d need a top level org for both legal and marketing (2 orgs) then sub organizations for each country/legal domain.
That’s my point. But not “9000 people” many people. That’s an ABSURD number, that’s almost certainly more people than there are record labels with nonstandard/custom contracts with spotify…
Each of those should be a team, not a 1k+ person department. A few tens of engineers for dev, the same for QA and DevOps, then maybe a few hundred employees for all the review processes, marketing, relationships with music labels&advertisers, etc.
Discord famously runs (ran) with 50-odd engineers. Silicon Valley’s VC-backed economy is famously terrible with over-highering by orders of magnitude, and since interest rates went up some of those companies realized that maybe they should stop burning so much money.
You have to keep in mind that they operate all over the world. Each country has its own labels and messy negotiations to do. Doing literally anything on a global scale takes a lot of people, no matter what it is, just to navigate the differing business environments.
So we should expect their legalese and marketing departments to be the heaviest staffed then, right?
Mind, I’m not disagreeing with you, you make a very good point. Licensing is arcanely complex, and it’s different for every country. Also makes sense to me that legal and marketing would be significantly impacted by all this.
Almost like you’d need a top level org for both legal and marketing (2 orgs) then sub organizations for each country/legal domain.
Seems like that could require quite a few people.
Edit: holy non-words, autoincorrect.
That’s my point. But not “9000 people” many people. That’s an ABSURD number, that’s almost certainly more people than there are record labels with nonstandard/custom contracts with spotify…