“Our continued success in growing the podcast ecosystem is predicated on the necessity that the Spotify Machine is always in motion.” –Sahar Elhabashi, VP and Head of Content Business, Spotify
Spotify is planning employment terminations for 200 people in its podcast operation. The news was detailed in a company blog post written by Sahar Elhabashi, VP and Head of Content Business at Spotify. (Read it HERE.) Casually titled An Update on Changes to Spotify’s Podcast Business, June 2023, the article describes a reorganization of Spotify’s podcast business, and offers a general account of the layoffs.
On the reorg part, the headline is that two acquired podcast studios, Parcast and Gimlet, will be merged. Spotify acquired the Parcast studio in March 2019 (RAIN coverage HERE), and podcast creation team Gimlet in February 2019 (RAIN coverage HERE). (The Gimlet action was paired in a monumental deal with the purchase of podcast creation platform Anchor, now the number-one hosting domain (according to Listen Notes).
As is often the case with mergers of any scope, even internal ones, redundancies happen that can result in staff cuts. In this case, the internal merging is part of a larger re-conception of Spotify’s podcast segment. The result: 200 employees will lose their jobs.
“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, or 2% of Spotify’s workforce,” according to Elhabashi. The affected individuals will receive what Spotify calls “generous severance packages.”
