Photo Credit: Christian Wiediger
Roughly 10 weeks after announcing plans to lay off north of 18,000 employees, Amazon has revealed that it intends “to eliminate about 9,000 more positions in the next few weeks” – including roles at Twitch.
The ecommerce giant’s CEO detailed this latest layoff round in a brief message to Amazon employees today. Of course, a number of companies (a growing list of music industry businesses among them) have recently moved to trim personnel spending. Meta last week queued up another 10,000 layoffs following an 11,000-role reduction in November, for instance, and reports suggest that layoffs are on the way from different companies yet.
Even before Amazon made the first wave of 2023 cuts official, however, the Seattle-headquartered conglomerate’s Amp live-radio app in October of 2022 parted with about half its staff, or 150 individuals. And while Amazon Music didn’t respond to a request for comment when asked whether it had been affected by the initial 18,000-person layoff round, LinkedIn posts show that several of the streaming service’s team members were impacted.
The newly described layoffs will “mostly” reach positions in Amazon Web Services (AWS), the aforesaid Twitch, advertising, and the People, Experience, and Technology (PXT) organization, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy communicated. (Last time around, “the majority” of the layoffs were made across Amazon Stores and PXT, per higher-ups.)
Regarding the exact jobs that Amazon is preparing to eliminate, Jassy disclosed that “the impacted teams are not yet finished making final decisions on precisely which roles will be impacted.” But the “goal is to have this complete by mid to late April,” according to the former AWS CEO Jassy, whose company will then “communicate with the impacted employees.”
“For several years leading up to this one, most of our businesses added a significant amount of headcount,” Jassy relayed of the circumstances that prompted the layoffs. “This made sense given what was happening in our businesses and the economy as a whole. However, given the uncertain economy in which we reside, and the uncertainty that exists in the near future, we have chosen to be more streamlined in our costs and headcount.”
Last week, Amazon Music launched a pair of new shows on Twitch to showcase hip-hop and Latin music, having raised the price of Unlimited in February. Additionally, the streaming service is continuing to lean particularly hard into exclusive content including songs and performances as its foremost competitors embrace artificial intelligence, classical music, and more.