Spotify this week laid off 15 employees in its US-based podcast division, spanning The Ringer and Spotify Studios, Variety has confirmed.
The cuts, made internally Tuesday, represent a 5% reduction in headcount across The Ringer and Spotify Studios. The roles that were eliminated will be reallocated to support Spotify’s video podcast push, a source familiar with the company said. Spotify is not canceling any podcast shows with the staff cuts. According to insiders, management at The Ringer as of Thursday afternoon had not held an all-staff meeting or communicated to employees about the layoffs.
A company rep declined to comment. “Spotify does not comment on staffing changes,” the spokesperson said.
There are no changes in the ANZ market.
The latest layoffs are nowhere near the cutbacks Spotify made in 2023, when in a “strategic realignment” of the podcast business it laid off about 200 staffers. And starting in late 2023 and into early 2024, the company overall let go about 1,500 workers, representing 17% of its worldwide employee base.
Spotify bought The Ringer, founded by former ESPN exec Bill Simmons, for about $250 million in cash in 2020. At the time, Spotify was spending heavily to bulk up its podcast content and technology capabilities, and the company also entered into exclusive deals with several top podcasters.
Those let go from The Ringer include senior staff writer Claire McNear and audio producer Jonathan Kermah, who posted about the layoffs on social media.
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Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, on the company’s Q1 earnings call in April, said the video podcasting initiative wasn’t a “pivot to video” per se but rather a move to boost overall user engagement. He didn’t rule out expanding to add different kinds of video content at some point, but he noted that Spotify added video podcasts because creators were asking for the feature.
“[T]ime for an unfortunate media rite of passage: after 9 years at The Ringer, I was laid off this week,” McNear wrote Thursday on X. “I’m gutted to leave, but grateful for my time there, the many wonderful folks I worked with over the years, and all the stories I got to tell.”
Kermah, aka “Kerm,” wrote in a post on Wednesday, “It hurts me to say that yesterday I was laid off from the Ringer after five years with the company,” “At 21 years old I was blessed with the opportunity to be an intern at my favorite website in the world doing work that I love. Who knew that it would turn into a five year journey.”
From Variety US