Spotify to lay off 200 staff working with podcasts

Spotify announced Monday that the streaming company will be cutting some 200 positions, equaling two per cent of its workforce, in an attempt to slim down its internal podcast operations.

The Sweden-based company said it was aiming to move to a "custom approach optimised for each show and artist," as part of "the next chapter of our podcast strategy."

"Doing so requires adapting; over the past few months, our senior leadership team has worked closely with HR to determine the optimal organisation for this next chapter," Spotify said in a statement.

"As a result, we have made the difficult but necessary decision to make a strategic realignment of our group and reduce our global podcast vertical and other functions by approximately 200 people," it added, indicating that it represented about two per cent of Spotify´s global workforce.

The New York Stock Exchange-listed streaming behemoth declared in April that it had surpassed 500 million monthly active users and 210 million paying subscribers, AFP reported.

Furthermore, the company also posted a first-quarter operating loss of 156 million euros ($167 million), compared to an operating loss of six million euros a year earlier, the report said.

The company attributed the widened loss to a higher headcount compared to a year earlier and changes in social charges.

After similar actions were taken by other titans of the tech sector, the streaming company revealed in January that it would be laying off 600 people.

Despite having a head start over competitors like Apple Music and Amazon Music and having high membership growth, the platform has rarely produced a quarterly profit since its introduction and has consistently posted annual losses.

In recent years, Spotify has also made over a billion euros in investments in podcasting, but analysts claim the firm has yet to prove that these investments are paying off.