Spotify lays off staff, shuts down podcast studio

Swedish music streaming giant Spotify has shut down its podcast studio and laid off some members of the team, the media reported. It has laid off members of its Studio 4 team, popularly known as Spotify Studios. For the team of 10 to 15 along with the studio director — who were the brains behind shows such as Dissect and Chapo: Kingpin on Trial, according to a report, Spotify called them and said their last day would be January 21.
The laid off employees will receive two months’ salary as severance pay. Some of the employees were reassigned work, whereas the rest were asked to register with the Spotify job board.
The Swedish music streaming company is in the process of trying to become more agile and achieve faster and more significant progress. It is not very clear whether the team was dissolved because of their less than satisfactory performance. The firm had invested heavily on podcasting, adding thousands of shows in the third quarter of 2021.
In an internal note, Julie McNamara, head of US studios and video, acknowledged the layoffs, according to the report.
She said that shutting the studio down would enable the company to “move faster and make more significant progress and facilitate more effective collaboration across our organisation.”
The team’s most recently produced programming are ‘Nosy Neighbors’, ‘We Said What We Said,’ and ‘Dope Labs’.
Source: The Verge