There’s a reason why these Spotify employees are smiling.
Life isn’t just amazing for Spotify employees. It’s also pretty good for their offspring.
Spotify has burned more than a billion dollars in the past three years alone. All of which is fantastic news for employees — and their kids.
Just recently, financial paperwork revealed that the average Spotify salary is $168,747. Even better, the average top-level executive at the company is raking in millions. But the benefits and perks are also top-notch.
+ How Many CDs, Downloads, and Streams It Takes to Earn a Spotify Salary…
According to the latest benefit list, all Spotify employees are eligible to receive 6 months of paid parental leave. Once that period lapses, parents are given a month of flexible location benefits to ease the transition back. And that goes for mothers and fathers, depending on who’s shouldering the care-taking responsibilities.
But women are also eligible to receive $10,000 in company-covered egg freezing costs.
Of course, that benefit can pay very rich dividends long after a Spotify career ends, depending on the ‘thaw date’.
+ Spotify Is Paying $2.77 Million a Month In Rent for Its World Trade Center Offices
Meanwhile, the hefty employee perks are being complemented by cushy office digs. According to details leaked earlier this month, the streaming platform is dropping a cool $2.77 million in monthly rent on their new World Trade Center offices in Manhattan. The tony digs will become the company’s worldwide headquarters, though just one of multiple offices sprinkling the globe.
All of which will help to attract the best and the brightest. And when it comes to luring top-ranked tech and coding people, the competition is extremely fierce. That makes it tough for companies to attract and retain A-plus employees, especially if serious salaries and perks aren’t included.
But can Spotify comfortably afford all this?
That’s a question being dismissed by many, including those salivating at the prospects of a billion-dollar Wall Street IPO. And in their defense, revenues are absolutely soaring while paid subscribers cross 60 million. Sounds like groundbreaking progress, but part of a very high-stakes gamble for streaming dominance.
All of which makes pricey perks a double-edged sword. After all, 6 months of paid leave is fantastic for you and your spouse. As long as there’s a gig when you come back!
This is standard among top notch companies. Spotify’s compensation is not even as high as Netflix, for example.
Spotify doesn’t pay bad but it doesn’t pay top money, compared to Netflix, Facebook, Google and even smaller players in the valley.
If you want top talent and to be the best service in the world you pay for it. But clearly you’ve not a single clue on how to run a business of this scale.
The only top-notch talent Spotify REALLY needs is the folks writing and performing the music that is their sole value proposition…
Just sayin’
Yeah? How Tidal doing?
OK, but, I really wish that you would read the article. Also I have started companies, either solo or involved with an early-stage team, I hope some of that learning is reflected in the article itself.
Clearly didn’t. There’s a reason why now you’re a hate journalist instead of an entrepreneur. Spotify doesn’t even pay what Pandora pays to employees.
Why don’t you write about Spotify releasing a new app for artists to help them understand their numbers and grow their careers? That just happened this week.
You choose to hate and you tell a part of the story to get musicians angry, when they don’t understand how the tech industry work.
You don’t win this space over Apple by hiring shitty software devs for 70k / year.
I don’t think this article is negative about Spotify. I commend any company that takes good care of their employees. Labels, artists, publishers and songwriters are allocated a percentage of revenue. Whatever Spotify wants to do with their percentage of that revenue is fine, as long as everyone who makes the music also gets their share. Unfortunately, not everyone who makes the music is getting their share, and that’s where we should be critical of Spotify’s business practices.
That’s all well and good. They just need to treat the songwriters who make the content that’s available on their service a little bit better.
By the way, there is a simple solution to treating songwriters better. They just need to do the following:
1. Take down any content in which the publishing rights aren’t licensed.
2. Tell the record labels (the real villains here) that they will no longer be making content available in which they’re unable to license the publishing rights. The days where a label could rush an album to market without ensuring songwriters were getting paid for that album are over.
3. Labels work with publishers to determine and communicate publishing rights information for new releases and existing albums to Spotify and their mechanical rights administrator.
4. Spotify licenses publishing rights, either through direct licenses or NOIs.
5. Spotify makes content available again, and songwriters get paid for every stream.
Naturally, it will be impossible for everything to be made available. There are some songs in which you’re just not going to be able to find the songwriters. And that’s fine. Don’t use that music. Services with 50 million tracks really shouldn’t exist at all. If we can force all parties to only make available music in which a songwriter is getting paid, songwriters are going to start getting paid royalties that they wouldn’t have been paid otherwise, Spotify’s legal problems go away, the black box goes away, and we’ll truly be on the path to having a healthy music industry.
Granted, a 50/50 split between label and publishing royalties would be even better, but let’s solve the above problem first.
The licenses themselves don’t make any sense. There wasn’t a successful effort to reinvent licenses to fit the streaming age.
As a result, publishers are fighting for a ‘performance’ license — which I guess would be a ‘performance’ in the listener’s earbuds?
And a ‘mechanical’ license — for a mechanical ‘reproduction’ in the ether clouds of streaming.
Meanwhile, recording labels swooped into this incompetence and claimed the lion’s share of the royalties. Can’t blame them, they are running their businesses more successfully and making a lot more money.
I’d be open to a simpler ‘streaming’ license, inclusive of all rights that might be necessary to stream music, provided that the licenses still require streaming services, administrators and labels to do all the things described above. I think whatever the solution ends up being shouldn’t be a blanket license solution, like what PROs and SoundExchange have. There needs to be some incentive for the services and labels to ensure music isn’t being used unless songwriters are getting licensed and paid for that usage, or face liability if songwriters aren’t getting paid. This needs to happen on a per song basis. We need to get rid of the black box. Unfortunately, this will require congress to update Copyright Law, and I’m not holding my breath for that. That crappy Sensenbrenner bill certainly isn’t going to cut it.
If we’re stuck with the current law, I think it makes more sense for non-interactive streaming (internet radio, Pandora, Sirius XM) to be a performance, and interactive (Spotify) to be a mechanical. An interactive stream is more of a private performance than a public performance anyway. Which is fine. Right now, for interactive streaming, performance royalties get deducted from mechanical royalties, which are paid to the PROs and then funneled to the songwriters several months later (sometimes years later under a consent decree licensing arrangement). If a stream was solely a mechanical, there would be no deduction of performance royalties from that mechanical, songwriters would get those royalties much faster, and no administrative fees would be deducted by the PROs. That seems like a much better arrangement for songwriters to me.
I was thinking they pay more than they can afford to the artists.
But with an average salary of 160.000 (that’s almost 16.000 month, right?) they are stealing artists… What the hell are they even doing for that money??? What if they would get a normal salary like 50.000$ (which is still good) and pay 110.000 more each employee, for artists???
Fuck them!!
Good luck finding a software engineer willing to work for 50k buddy. You go start your own streaming service and tell me how that goes