Spotify has laid off members of staff and shut down its podcast studio.
Spotify shuts studio and has made works redundant
The music-streaming giant - which is based in Sweden and had a podcast studio known as Studio 4 with between 10 and 15 employees - allegedly called the workers to tell them their last working day would be January 21st.
A note obtained by The Verge read: "[Spotify] needs to move faster and make more significant progress and facilitate more effective collaboration across our organization."
It was later alleged by a so-called "affected employee" claimed of Spotify that there was "no clear mandate" of what was supposed to happen with Studio 4 which - according to The Verge - only "occasionally appear in earnings reports as Spotify Studios."
The former employee told The Verge: "When you have Studio 4, it’s like, ‘Well, if all of these boxes are already checked by all of these other studios, then where does that really leave us,’ and so it felt to me like there was no clear mandate of what Studio 4 was supposed to do."
The source went on to claim that the success of Studio 4 - or 'Spotify Studios' - was never "vocalised" due to the "churning" nature of managers.
They added: "A lot of the successes that Spotify Studios had were never really vocalized because the leadership was always churning. I have never once heard anybody mentioned Studio 4 by name or point to any of the work or the shows that we’ve done as something to be celebrated. We’re being intentionally disregarded in explanations about metrics, and growth, and listenership, and all that kind of stuff.