LAST UPDATE | 23 Jan 2023

SWEDISH MUSIC STREAMING giant Spotify has announced that it is cutting 6% of its roughly 10,000 employees, the latest among a slew of cost-cutting announcements by technology companies.

“In hindsight, I was too ambitious in investing ahead of our revenue growth. And for this reason, today, we are reducing our employee base by about six percent across the company,” Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said on Spotify’s official blog.

Elk noted the need for “speed” and “efficiency” and added that this resulted in a need to make a “difficult but necessary decision to reduce our number of employees”. 

The Spotify CEO added: ”Over the last few months we’ve made a considerable effort to rein-in costs, but it simply hasn’t been enough.”

The Swedish company, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, has invested heavily since its launch to fuel growth with expansions into new markets and, in later years, exclusive content such as podcasts.

Spotify has never posted a full-year net profit despite its success in the online music market.

Last week, Google’s parent company Alphabet’s cut 12,000 employees and Microsoft also announced plans to lay off 10,000 staff.

There were other notable tech companies to cut staff last year also, including Meta (which owns Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp), Twitter, Stripe and Lyft.