Photo Credit: Brusk Dede
Back in March, Amazon launched a live-radio app called Amp. Now, amid a broader push to reduce costs, the ecommerce giant has reportedly laid off about half of the team behind the eight-month-old platform.
Amazon’s latest staff cut, which is said to have affected about 150 Amp employees, came to light in a recent report from Business Insider. Several of the impacted professionals (many of whom appear to have been based in Atlanta) have also taken to LinkedIn to comment on the development and/or leave “recommendations” for their former coworkers.
Notwithstanding the seemingly far-reaching personnel reduction at Amp – which touted a Nicki Minaj partnership out of the gate, debuted a Joe Budden program in May, and rolled out a show featuring Halsey earlier in October – an Amazon spokeswoman confirmed that the platform will continue to operate.
“At Amazon, we think big, experiment, and invest in new ideas to delight customers,” Amazon Music PR head (and former Songkick VP of communications) Rebecca Silverstein indicated in a statement. “We also continually evaluate the progress and potential of our products and services to deliver customer value, and we regularly make adjustments based on those assessments.
“Following a recent review, we’ve made the decision to consolidate a few teams so we can focus on the growth and scaling of Amp,” she finished, noting also that the laid-off individuals will be eligible to apply for other positions within Amazon.
Unfortunately, Amazon’s Amp cutback isn’t the only recent example of how today’s difficult economic climate is affecting companies, professionals, and events in and around the music space.
From (perhaps overdue) streaming service price increases and canceled tours to record-low stock prices and ticket-cost hikes, recent weeks and months have brought with them multiple less-than-ideal headlines. On the latter front, Glastonbury organizers two weeks ago unveiled a double-digit jump in the cost of passes to their 2023 event.
Meanwhile, BMI in August (not long before shifting to a for-profit business model, that is) announced layoffs of its own, followed by cuts at Patreon (extending to nearly one-fifth of the business’s workforce) in September.
Lastly, Downtown’s CD Baby and Soundrop three weeks back revealed different layoffs yet. Though execs attributed the dismissals “to the current economic conditions,” some of the 30 or so impacted employees told DMN: “The truth is that they are going to stop several services provided by CDBaby and Soundrop and employees are now becoming an adjustment variable for businesses.”