Music streaming giant Spotify announced that it will slash 6% of its employees, or about 600 staffers, globally. The Swedish company’s CEO, Daniel Ek, announced in a memo on Monday, January 23, that a series of changes would be implemented to streamline the organisation, including “the difficult but necessary decision to reduce our number of employees”. “In hindsight, I was too ambitious in investing ahead of our revenue growth. And for this reason, today, we are reducing our employee base by about 6% across the company. I take full accountability for the moves that got us here today,” the CEO said in his memo. The company had just over 9,800 full time employees as of its last earnings report.

“Like many other leaders, I hoped to sustain the strong tailwinds from the pandemic and believed that our broad global business and lower risk to the impact of a slowdown in ads would insulate us,” Ek said. He further added that an average employee will receive approximately five months’ severance that will be calculated based on local notice period requirements and employee tenure. “All accrued and unused vacation will be paid out to any departing employee. We will continue to cover healthcare for employees during their severance period,” the memo added.  All employees will be eligible for outplacement services for 2 months.

The memo further said that for employees whose immigration status is concerned with their employment, human resource business partners are working with them to help them find work elsewhere.

In October last year, Spotify reportedly shut down 11 original podcasts from its in-house studios, as a part of cost-cutting and layoffs. Less than 5% of the company’s staff on original podcasts were either laid off or reassigned to new shows.

Read: From Google to Twitter: List of tech giants that did layoffs recently