New DICE layoffs have affected at least 30 team members, according to reports and comments from a company representative. Photo Credit: Elisa Ventur
A little less than two years after revealing a $122 million Series C raise, event-discovery and ticketing platform DICE has laid off approximately 30 team members.
London-headquartered DICE acknowledged the personnel reduction following an initial report from Resident Advisor. Additionally, certain of the affected professionals – who’d worked for the company’s creative and marketing teams – have taken to LinkedIn to confirm the unfortunate news.
Per the mentioned outlet, the entirety of SoftBank-backed DICE’s creative team (excepting the creative director) was axed, while the “majority of the marketing team” was likewise let go. Reportedly the third round of layoffs that the nine-year-old entity’s made in recent months, the team-size trim will according to higher-ups be offset by agreements with freelancers.
“We recently made the difficult decision to restructure parts of our business to ensure we can focus on our most important initiatives,” a DICE spokesperson communicated in a widely circulated statement. “This isn’t an exercise we carry out lightly and we’re sad that we have to say goodbye to colleagues that we love working with and respect enormously.”
Notwithstanding the redundancies, DICE, which expanded into Germany 14 months ago and brought on former Hulu social media and digital strategy exec Katie Soo as chief business officer in February of 2023, indicated in remarks to TheTicketingBusinessNews that it intends to keep on making “’strategic hires that will drive forward’” company-wide growth.
Needless to say, DICE is hardly alone in announcing layoffs, which have reached music industry companies including Spotify, Utopia, Sonos, Downtown, Universal Music’s Motown Records, Warner Music, and a number of others to this point in 2023.
Moreover, these less-than-ideal developments followed the 2022 shutdowns of destination-event company Pollen as well as U.K.-based ticketing businesses Festicket and Event Genius. Pollen reportedly had some $83 million in unpaid bills when it went belly up, and employees reportedly failed to receive even a portion of their due compensation.
But the latter quarter of 2022 and 2023’s initial seven months have delivered comparatively positive funding-related headlines on the event and ticketing sides. Barcelona-based events platform Xceed revealed a €2 million raise in November, for instance.
More recently, Events.com unveiled a $100 million capital commitment to kick off 2023, and New York City-headquartered event-management platform POSH in late April detailed a $5 million seed raise. Besides offering its tools to clients, of course, POSH has now built out a digital magazine and a YouTube channel centering on event-planning information.
