Dawn Ostroff, head of Spotify’s content and advertising business, is leaving as the company sheds 6% of its workforce

Dawn Ostroff is leaving Spotify as the company’s head of content and advertising amid budget cuts affecting 6% of the company’s workforce.

Amid budget cuts in the once invincible tech sector, Spotify said hundreds of jobs would be cut. In a memo to employees posted online, CEO Daniel Ek said he was “too ambitious” to scale the company. “To better balance our costs, we made the difficult but necessary decision to reduce our staff,” he explains. “While I believe this decision is the right one for Spotify, I understand that with our historical focus on growth, many of you will see this as a shift in our culture. But as we develop and grow as a company, so must the way we work, while staying true to our core values.

I praised Ostroff for her contributions and said Alex Norstrom would take over her duties. Ostroff, a Condé Nast and CW veteran, joined the company in 2018.

“Dawn has made a huge impact not only on Spotify, but on the audio industry in general,” Ek wrote. “Thanks to his efforts, Spotify has grown our podcast content by 40x, driven significant innovation in the medium, and become the leading music and podcast service in many markets. These investments in audio have opened up new opportunities for music and podcast creators, and also fueled renewed interest in the potential of Spotify’s audio advertising.”

Ostroff will soon assume the role of Senior Advisor to facilitate this transition, Ek said.

Under Ostroff, Spotify made a strategic move into podcasting, signing Joe Rogan, Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground, and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle to lucrative deals. The company also made several acquisitions totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, buying The Ringer, Gimlet and Parcast.

Stockholm-based Spotify, which reports its fourth-quarter results next week, said it ended the third quarter with 456 million monthly active users, up 20% from the same period last year. However, premium subscriptions grew more slowly. They reached 195 million, an increase of 13%.

The layoffs are the latest to rock the tech industry, which drove the broader market for more than a decade before hitting a big bump in 2022. It was the worst year for tech stocks — and the entire market — since the financial crisis of 2008. Unlike when social media was in its infancy and a number of startups were still raising funds, the industry-wide decision came after an ambitious increase in the number of people to tighten their belts during the pandemic. The result is tens of thousands of layoffs from a largely unknown workforce. Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon were among the companies that announced cuts in recent weeks.