Spotify to Lay Off 200 Employees in Podcast Strategy Shift
Spotify, the audio streaming platform, said on Monday that it planned to lay off about 200 people, including workers at the popular podcast studios Gimlet Media and Parcast.
The 2 percent cut to the company’s work force is part of a “strategic realignment” of the podcast division, Sahar Elhabashi, the head of podcasts at Spotify, said in a memo to Spotify employees on Monday.
Since early 2019, the number of podcast shows on Spotify has grown to more than five million from about 200,000, Ms. Elhabashi said in a revised version of the memo that Spotify posted on its website.
That period was a boom era for the podcasting industry, with media companies making large investments to expand their offerings. Spotify, which is based in Stockholm, bought Gimlet for $230 million in 2019 and The Ringer for about $200 million in 2020, sending a signal that it had broadened its ambitions beyond music streaming. This flurry of spending has cooled in the last year, with companies cutting podcast jobs and curbing budgets.
Source: The New York Times
