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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.
Chief content officer Dawn Ostroff was the driving force behind the streaming company’s move into podcasts.
She secured the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s Archetypes series in a deal thought to be worth £20 million – but when she cut around 600 jobs and announced a management shake-up, CEO Daniel Ek said yesterday that Ostroff ” has decided to leave Spotify’.
Drama royal: Chief content officer Dawn Ostroff secured the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s Archetypes series in a deal believed to be worth £20 million
The Stockholm-based company is just the latest tech giant to feel the heat of economic uncertainty, saying it would cut its global workforce by 6 percent.
The group employs nearly 10,000 people worldwide, of which approximately 671 are in the UK. The company said cost-cutting efforts over the past few months had failed to turn around and more drastic changes were needed to boost business, including “fundamentally changing how we work at the top.”
Ek said: “Like many other leaders, I hoped to maintain the strong tailwind of the pandemic and believed that our broad global operations and lower risk of the impact of an advertising slowdown would isolate us. In retrospect, I was too ambitious to invest before our sales growth.’
The company said Ostroff helped expand podcast content by 40x by signing big contracts with Harry and Meghan and the Obamas.
But this shift to investment in podcasts and content has come at a cost, as the company suffered £130m losses in the nine months to September 30.
Spotify’s shares have also been hit by mounting consumer spending pressures and a wider tech sell-off, with shares down more than 70 per cent since February 2021 highs, sending its value down around £40bn.
Head of Research at Enders Analysis Alice Enders described Spotify’s job cuts as “inevitable” for a company that relies so heavily on advertising.
More than half of Spotify’s 456 million monthly users listen for free, meaning any global advertising slump is likely to weigh heavily on the platform.
The same advertising pressure has caused massive job losses at Facebook owner Meta, Snapchat and Twitter in recent months.
Tech analyst at PP Foresight Paolo Pescatore said job cuts are simply “the flavor of the month” for tech companies. Amazon.
This month alone, Google parent Alphabet and Microsoft announced cuts. 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 since early 2021 to more than 200,000.