Spotify laid off 200 employees from its podcast division

The current economic state isn’t new to anyone. It’s affecting each company at certain levels. Many companies have recently been laying off their employees to cope with the situation. Prior to this situation, Spotify laid off about 200 employees from its podcast division.

Job cuts have become quite common these days. Many big tech giants like T-Mobile, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta have laid off hundreds of employees to cut costs. Spotify already laid off 6% of its employees earlier this year.

Spotify laid off 200 employees from its podcast division

This news comes from Variety. Over 2021 and 2022, Spotify has been making a gigantic push into the podcast market. It became a major player in the market, but this seems to be where the company is cutting some weight. In a memo to its workers, Spotify announced that its podcast division will be losing 200 workers.

“We have made the difficult but necessary decision to make a strategic realignment of our group and reduce our global podcast vertical and other functions by approximately 200 people”, said Sahar Elhabashi, Spotify’s VP and head of podcast business, in the memo.

Basically, the letter claims that Spotify’s podcasting initiatives are taking a significant turn. Although the email was vague about its specific plans, it did state that it would collaborate with “leading podcasters from around the world”. So, the unfavourable side effect of this move is layoffs.

The company’s whole staff was reduced by around 2% in this round of layoffs, which isn’t a huge amount given the scale of the business. But the podcasting section was the only one to eliminate any positions. Although we don’t know the exact number, 200 people is certainly not a small number.

Given that Dawn Ostroff, the chief content and advertising business officer and leader of the podcast division, was let go during the most recent round of layoffs, this doesn’t bode well for the company’s podcasting initiatives. Additionally, the business discontinued 11 podcasts in late 2016. One can only wonder how profitable the company’s podcast business is given that Spotify is laying off so many employees from its podcast section.