497
Spotify to axe 1,500 workers to save costs
(www.bbc.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Trying to come up with rough IT numbers and I don't think I could break 500 (depends on how much they self-host and not considering contractors). Even if I bump it up to 4500 it seems insane for a large "digital distribution" company to have 50% of its workforce to be non-IT.
My buddy works there now, as the audiobook company he worked for got acquired by them.
You would be shocked how stupid and manual the content acquisition process is. Book publishers might as well still be operating back in the 90s, it's all phone calls and spreadsheets attached to the emails and manual FTP uploads.
If the music business is anything like the audiobook business they likely need so many non IT just to keep the machine fed with content.
That is what I was thinking, too. Maybe it's really just marketing, hand curated content like someone commented or something else non technical.
I saw banks being maintained by 10-20 people.