Spotify boss who signed Harry and Meghan podcast quits as streaming giant cuts 600 jobs
The Spotify executive who signed Harry and Meghan to a multi-million pound podcast deal is leaving as the company cuts hundreds of jobs.
Content manager Dawn Ostroff was the driving force behind the shift from streaming to podcasting.
She got the Archetypes series from the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in an estimated £20million deal – but announcing around 600 job cuts and a management reshuffle, chief executive Daniel Ek said said yesterday that Ostroff had ‘decided to leave Spotify’.
Royal drama: Content manager Dawn Ostroff has secured the Archetypes series from the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in an estimated £20m deal
The Stockholm-based company is just the latest tech giant to feel the heat of economic uncertainty and said it would cut its global workforce by 6%.
The group employs nearly 10,000 people worldwide, including around 671 in the UK. The company said cost-cutting efforts in recent months had failed to change the dial and more drastic changes were needed to boost business, including “fundamentally changing the way we operate at the top.” .
Ek said: ‘Like many other leaders, I was hoping to ride out the strong tailwinds of the pandemic and believed that our extensive global business and lower risk of impact from a slowdown in ads would isolate us. Looking back, I was overambitious investing before our revenue growth.
The company said Ostroff helped expand the podcast’s content 40 times, signing major deals with Harry and Meghan and the Obamas.
But this shift to investing in podcasts and content has come at a cost, as the business racked up losses of £130million in the nine months to September 30.
Shares of Spotify have also been hit by growing pressure on consumer spending and a broader tech selloff, with shares down more than 70% from highs in February 2021, dropping around £40bn from his value.
Enders Analysis head of research Alice Enders described Spotify’s job cuts as “inevitable” for a business that relies so heavily on advertising.
More than half of Spotify’s 456 million monthly users listen for free, meaning any global advertising crisis is likely to weigh heavily on the platform.
The same advertising pressure has also led to massive job cuts for Meta, Snapchat and Facebook-owner Twitter in recent months.
PP Foresight technical analyst Paolo Pescatore said job losses are simply “the flavor of the month” for tech companies. Amazon.
Google parent Alphabet and Microsoft announced cuts this month only. Data website Layoffs.fyi estimates that more than 55,000 people have lost their jobs at tech companies so far in 2023, bringing the total number of job losses to well over 200,000 since the start. of 2021.
