“During the next few hours, individual interviews will take place with the employees concerned,” said the managing director and co-founder of the flagship of online music, Daniel Ek, in an online message.

"In hindsight, I was too ambitious by investing faster than our turnover growth," he wrote in a message to employees.

“For this reason, we are reducing our workforce by around 6% across the group,” explains the boss of the group listed in New York.

While Spotify has been profitable from time to time, the Stockholm-born group has been steadily posting losses for several years, despite skyrocketing subscriber growth and a lead over rivals like Apple Music.

“As you know, we have made a considerable effort in recent months to reduce our costs, but it has simply not been enough”, justified Daniel Ek on Monday.

The announcement from Spotify, which is due to publish its annual results on January 31, follows a series of layoff plans at the global internet giants in recent weeks, even though its workforce is much smaller.

After layoffs at Amazon, Meta and Microsoft, Google in turn announced 12,000 job cuts worldwide on Saturday, or just over 6% of its workforce.

Microsoft had announced on Wednesday 10,000 layoffs by the end of March.

© 2023 AFP