Spotify Technology S.A.’s organizational structure reflects the nature of business transactions with artists and music consumers. The company’s operations are essentially a marketplace that allows customers to access creators’ music and other digital content via a network-like platform, which requires structural flexibility to rapidly grow while competing against the digital content distribution operations of Amazon, Apple, Google, and Pandora, among other firms. As a fundamental business development and design element, the corporate structure empowers Spotify to maintain rapid expansion that strengthens competitive advantages against other firms. In understanding the company’s organizational structure, it is beneficial to consider how the structure relates to other aspects of the enterprise. For example, the interconnections among various functional areas achieve competitive advantages by knowledge exchange and clustering through Spotify’s corporate structure. In this regard, knowledge and related assets are at the core of the business operations and competitive advantages of the music streaming platform business.
Spotify’s corporate structure presents an organizational design with a system for agile software development, along with human resource agility. The company’s administration achieves sufficient flexibility for transcending barriers and challenges to growth, while addressing variations among music markets’ preferences and unique characteristics. In this way, Spotify is an example of operational effectiveness achieved through a flexible organizational structure along with strategies and approaches like agile development. The on-demand streaming music corporation could require future strategic changes, which could be integrated with business structural support.
Spotify’s N-Form Organizational Structure & Structural Characteristics
Spotify Technology S.A. has an N-form organizational structure. This type of corporate structure is based on the key principle of sharing and integrating knowledge extensively throughout the music streaming enterprise and its operations. Spotify’s structural characteristics are developed based on applying this underlying principle for operational effectiveness. In accordance with CEO Daniel Ek’s aim of rapidly growing the business globally, this corporate structure makes the company’s workforce flexible enough to ensure agility in adjusting operations to old and new challenges for international expansion.
A main characteristic of Spotify’s N-form corporate structure is the sharing and integration of knowledge throughout the organization and its members. Workers are grouped into “squads,” which are then grouped into “tribes,” to maximize the benefits of the clustering of related knowledge and skills, to arrive at new insights of higher value to the digital content platform enterprise. Another organizational structural characteristic is the presence and use of permanent and temporary groupings of Spotify’s employees, for the purpose of operational development and enhancement. For example, the company’s corporate structure has groups called “guilds,” each composed of employees from various squads or tribes, and involving certain commonalities, such as programming language, music interests, or variables that relate to improving Spotify’s value chain and core competencies.
Spotify’s organizational structure supports managerial approaches that highlight the value of each worker. The corporate headquarters, human resource managers, operations managers, and other leaders employ strategies and tactics that consider workers’ valuable contributions, such as ideas for new functions and features of the company’s music streaming apps for mobile and non-mobile devices. In ways, this characteristic of the corporate structure helps in employee recognition, which is essential for encouraging workers to embody Spotify’s organizational culture. Moreover, considering the need for sharing and integrating knowledge, the online content streaming company’s organizational chart includes horizontal lines of communication and interaction in its organizational structure. This factor structurally supports the actual inter-workgroup dissemination of knowledge at Spotify, such as knowledge about new cultural trends that influence music consumption in regional markets.
To facilitate knowledge integration and sharing, Spotify’s organizational structure espouses managers’ and leaders’ high level of involvement in developing music streaming operations. For example, management personnel are involved in permanent or temporary project-based workgroups, such as for mobile app development, thus emphasizing the value of each employee and the perspective of equality. Based on this structural system, Spotify’s corporate structure exhibits strong heterarchy. Even though there is centralization via the organizational headquarters, this heterarchy involves the transience or shifts in the positions and roles of people in management and leadership. In this aspect of Spotify’s organizational structure, an employee could be a group member in a mobile app development project, and be an advisor for another workgroup.
Strategic Implications of Spotify’s Corporate Structure
Structural characteristics have a direct link to Spotify’s corporate mission and vision statements, which give rise to strategic objectives for giving profitable opportunities to artists and enjoyable experiences to listeners. For example, the company’s organizational structure enables employees to collaborate to continuously enhance the quality of the music streaming service. In addition, Spotify’s business model, generic competitive strategy, and intensive growth strategies are factors that determine the development of the corporate structure. For instance, the platform business model and rapid business development require high organizational flexibility. This flexibility is achieved through Spotify’s N-form organizational structure.
Spotify Technology S.A.’s organizational structure also provides communication channels that support human resource strategies. The company’s strategic objectives to develop an agile corporate culture for agile software development are facilitated through the structural component of lateral communication channels. Moreover, the corporate structure has strategic implications in Spotify’s value chain. For example, the company’s core resources and capabilities are effectively utilized in the value chain through the flexible workforce groupings as structural support for operations.
Key Points on Spotify’s Corporate Structure
This case study on Spotify directs attention to the relatively uncommon application of the N-form corporate structure. This application contrasts with other multinational firms that tend to exhibit a hierarchical structure of the unitary type. Spotify understands the beneficial characteristics of its organizational structure. This understanding is notable in the music streaming company’s flexibility to adjust to current business needs in the international on-demand digital content market. In addition, this structural analysis uncovers the relationship between Spotify’s corporate structure and the application of agile software development. For example, exhibiting features of a matrix organizational structure, the online company’s N-form corporate structure ensures sufficient organizational flexibility. Consequently, this flexibility gives rise to Spotify’s organizational agility to apply agile software development principles in music platform business operations and development. Flexibility is a critical factor for integrating music market nuances into the company’s growth and expansion strategic plans. Also, such flexibility is a factor in competitive advantages and the business strengths described in the SWOT analysis of Spotify Technology S.A.
References
- Afonin, A. M., Afonina, V. E., & Itsakov, E. D. (2015). The Key Points of Building a Corporate Structure. Oxford Journal of Scientific Research, 440.
- Aubry, M., & Lavoie-Tremblay, M. (2018). Rethinking organizational design for managing multiple projects. International Journal of Project Management, 36(1), 12-26.
- Dingsøyr, T., & Lassenius, C. (2016). Emerging themes in agile software development: Introduction to the special section on continuous value delivery. Information and Software Technology, 77, 56-60.
- Eriksson, M., Fleischer, R., Johansson, A., Snickars, P., & Vonderau, P. (2019). Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music. MIT Press.
- Grochla, E., & Szyperski, N. (Eds.). (2018). Information systems and organizational structure. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.
- International Trade Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce – The Media and Entertainment Industry in the United States.
- International Trade Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce – The Software and Information Technology Services Industry in the United States.
- Král, P., & Králová, V. (2016). Approaches to changing organizational structure: The effect of drivers and communication. Journal of Business Research, 69(11), 5169-5174.
- Salimova, T. A., Biryukova, L. I., Makolov, V. I., & Levina, T. A. (2015). Conceptual Provisions of Formation of the Quality Management System Within the Integrated Corporate Structure. International Business Management, 9(6), 1129-1135.
- Spotify Technology S.A. Governance.
- Spotify Technology S.A.’s Annual Report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (Form 20-F).
- Spotify Technology S.A.’s Website.
- Strese, S., Meuer, M. W., Flatten, T. C., & Brettel, M. (2016). Organizational antecedents of cross-functional coopetition: The impact of leadership and organizational structure on cross-functional coopetition. Industrial Marketing Management, 53, 42-55.
