A new round of Sonos layoffs has been confirmed by CEO Patrick Spence. Photo Credit: Tim Foster
On the heels of a poorly received app redesign that prompted an apology from CEO Patrick Spence, Sonos has confirmed a new round of layoffs affecting about 100 employees.
Spence himself acknowledged the personnel reduction in a statement, following various reports on the layoffs and related LinkedIn posts from impacted individuals.
“We made the difficult decision to say goodbye to approximately 100 team members representing 6% of the company,” communicated the Sonos head of nearly eight years. “This action was a difficult, but necessary, measure to ensure continued, meaningful investment in Sonos’ product roadmap while setting Sonos up for long term success.
“Our continued commitment to the app recovery and delighting our customers remains our priority and we are confident that today’s actions will not impact our ability to deliver on that promise. Today, we are focused on our departing employees and ensuring they have the support they need,” concluded the former BlackBerry exec.
As things stand, Sonos doesn’t appear to have publicly identified the exact positions that are part of the layoffs. However, some of these roles came to light in the aforementioned LinkedIn posts pertaining to the unfortunate news.
Said posts were penned by Sonos’ now-former software development engineer, senior technical program manager, global procurement analyst, and global head of music and entertainment, to name a few.
Predictably, customer and observer responses to the less-than-ideal development are hardly positive, with many taking the opportunity to voice their ongoing qualms with the initially mentioned app changes. Of course, time will reveal exactly how Sonos addresses the matter throughout the “app recovery” process.
In the bigger picture, the layoff round marks the latest in a line of cutbacks at Sonos, which in June of 2023 trimmed about 7% of its workforce. And though it perhaps goes without saying, the $20 million to $30 million in expenses Spence is anticipating from the app debacle certainly aren’t helping the situation.
Furthermore, Sonos isn’t alone in opting to reduce the size of its team during 2024.
Solely in and around the music space, the long list of companies that have laid off personnel during or just before the year includes Universal Music, Spotify, TikTok, Proper Group (previously Utopia Music), Amazon Prime Video, Warner Music, and Google/YouTube.
When trading concluded today, Sonos stock (NASDAQ: SONO) was worth $11.61 per share, reflecting a roughly 1% slip from opening. All told, the company, which reported $397.1 million in revenue for the three months ended June 29th and flipped to profitable during the same period, has seen its stock price slip by north of 30% since 2024’s beginning.
