Soundwide, parent company of Native Instruments and iZotope, lays off 8% of global staff
Soundwide joins a growing list of big tech companies that are cutting costs amid fears of worsening global economic conditions.
Image: Victor Lucas / Alamy
Soundwide, the parent company of some of the biggest names in music tech including Native Instruments and iZotope, has laid off approximately eight percent of its global workforce.
According to Resident Advisor, employees at Native Instruments were informed of the redundancies at a company-wide meeting last Wednesday (25 January).
Soundwide CEO Rob Singer cited challenging economic conditions as the primary cause of the layoffs, whose effects are felt more keenly in the sales and marketing departments than the engineering side of things.
Responding to news of the cut, a representative from Soundwide told CDM that there will be no changes to product offerings and that customers will be unaffected, a claim that remains to be seen across the company’s stable of brands.
Native Instruments, for one, has seen a turbulent past few years with major leadership changes (CEO and co-founder Daniel Haver and Chief Innovation Officer and President Mate Galic both stepped down in 2020) and restructurings which saw 20 per cent of staff get laid off. The brand also came under fire for allegedly failing to act on claims of racism within the company.
With the recent move, Soundwide joins a growing list of big tech companies that are cutting costs amid concerns of worsening global economic conditions. Audio streaming giant Spotify recently announced that it is laying off six percent of its workforce (around 600 employees), a decision CEO Daniel Ek described as “difficult but necessary”.
“We hoped to sustain the strong tailwinds from the pandemic and believed that our broad global business and lower risk to the slowdown of ads would insulate us,” Ek wrote. “In hindsight, I was too ambitious in investing ahead of our revenue growth… I take full accountability for the moves that got us here today.”
Last April, Soundwide was announced as the new parent company of iZotope and Native Instruments, bringing the two giants in music creation and audio technology together under one roof. The company also welcomed several brands under its umbrella, including Plugin Alliance, Brainworx, and the newly formed Sound Stacks, with the aim to develop “the world’s most extensive ecosystem of audio creation products.”
