Eliah Seton, who has announced another round of layoffs at SoundCloud that are expected to affect about eight percent of the company. Photo credit: SoundCloud
About ten months after shedding about a fifth of its global workforce — and ten weeks after Eliah Seton took office as CEO — SoundCloud has announced plans to shed another eight percent of its workforce.
Seton broke the unfortunate news to staff in a meeting, as well as in a letter circulated internally (received by DMN) sometime in the past 24 hours. According to the letter, the layoffs form part of the Berlin-based music-sharing platform’s broader plan to reach profitability before closing in 2023.
“This is a challenging but essential decision to ensure the health of our business and bring SoundCloud to profitability by the end of this year,” said former Warner Music Group CEO Seton. “By doing so, we are securing the company’s future for the millions of artists who depend on us for their livelihood and self-fulfillment, not to mention the millions of fans who come to SoundCloud for the joy of music.”
Although Seton has not identified the affected roles and departments, some of the affected professionals are already using LinkedIn to confirm that they no longer work for the Merlin-affiliated company.
According to the relevant profile, one of these individuals spent approximately 18 months as a SoundCloud A&R manager in the United States. While Seton doesn’t disclose the benefits accorded to the fired team members in his letter, he did hint that “we are absolutely committed to treating everyone with the utmost respect and dignity and to being so generous in this process.” Kind and way as possible.”
SoundCloud — which launched a fan-to-artist messaging tool two weeks ago — has further shrunk its ranks, joining a long list of music industry companies that have driven downsizing to this point in 2023.
Downtown Music and Utopia Music in April announced what appeared to be a sweeping restructuring and another round of layoffs, respectively, after CD Baby’s parent company Downtown parted with some of its workforce in March.
That same month, both Disney and Microsoft shut down their respective Metaverse entities, while Amazon laid off about 400 Twitch team members (and certain Amazon Music professionals) and SiriusXM cut 475 jobs.
Just before the start of 2023, Google/Alphabet, SoundHound and Spotify announced layoffs of their own; The latter company dropped the music quiz game Heardle and Spotify Live shortly thereafter.