I‘m no business major, I have no clue how to handle a company on a stock market. But the results I see is that leadership took steps that let into people loosing their jobs. Why are shareholders and management so important and employees at the branches are not? Everyone in that chain should be taken into account.

Do you have a specific claim or question, or is this an emotional response anytime employees are let go?

I already showed you that shareholders have been losing money for 5.5 years (while employees were being paid).

Yeah this emotional because it makes no sense. The system appears to be not working.

The system literally is working. Spotify still exists and you can get music there. Most employees kept their job.

The system that’s not working is literally the one in your head. Literally, your imagined ideals sign zero paychecks and add no value.

Shareholders have had a poor investment so they do share in the failure. But the way a business works is shareholders vote for a board and the board installs management. This management then installs leaders/managers to oversee the different components of the business.

These people are the business and are often compensated in large part with meaningful equity. Everyone else (middle managers and contributors) are not the business - they just work for it. They are mainly compensated with a salary and are called employees. They are hired to complete tasks for the managers.

The managers will increase and decrease the number of employees based on the CEOs and other managers plan which the board approves. Plans often have certain assumptions that everyone (managers, not employees) agrees on and sometimes it doesn’t pan out so they have to change the plan.

Sometimes the managers resign or are fired when the plan fails and it was their fault. Other times they aren’t because it wasn’t something they could avoid (economic downturn, rise in rates, inflation, etc) or other reasons (they could be large shareholders themselves).

If they keep running losses, every employee loses their jobs. The company is losing money.

> A riskless investment in sp500

Just a nitpick, but this isn't the traditional definition of "riskless", which would be Treasuries. I believe the S&P 500 experiences an average drawdown of 14% in any given year, so it's hardly without risk.

You could more accurately say that SPOT has been underperforming "the market", "equities", or "beta".

It is my tongue-in-cheek way of referring to the belief that the US federal government will ensure the broad market does not stay down for long.

That is an absolutely fair point. ;-)

Given that the major shareholders are the big music rights holders which is one of Spotifies major costs shareholder have done alright.

This is not true. They must be very insignificant shareholders (less than 1%).

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/SPOT/holders/

Thabks for that. I've not been paying attention - the major labels have all sold (almost all) their stakes over the last few years.

I can’t find any references for when the 3 major labels held significant stakes in Spotify. Only Sony did with 5.7% at the time they went public, according to the principal shareholders section:

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1639920/000119312518...

Other majors had slightly less than Sony each - just under the 5% threshold.