Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.
- Streaming services like Netflix and Spotify are overtaking traditional entertainment companies in staff size and market share of employees, according to data from LinkedIn.
- LinkedIn Economist Guy Berger described the entertainment industry trend toward digital companies as reflective of trends in the US workforce at large.
Streaming services like Netflix and Spotify have overtaken a number of traditional entertainment companies and prominent film studios in staff size over the past five years, according to LinkedIn data on employee numbers shared exclusively with Business Insider.
The site compared the total employee counts of the top 10 entertainment-industry companies in 2013 and 2018.
Netflix moved up six spots on the list from No. 9 in 2013 to No. 3 this year, while music streaming giant Spotify moved from No. 12 to No. 6. The music streaming service Pandora also entered the top 10 after being previously unranked in 2013.
LinkedIn data on the top 10 entertainment industry companies by employee count.
LinkedIn's data on employee numbers showed that newer, digital companies like Netflix, Spotify, and Pandora nearly doubled their overall entertainment industry market share over the past five years.
These digital companies occupied 12.5% of the total entertainment industry workforce in 2013, but that figure grew to nearly 24% in 2018, according to LinkedIn.
In an email to Business Insider, LinkedIn Economist Guy Berger described the entertainment industry's shift toward digital companies as reflective of a larger national trend.
"The shift to more digital roles, companies and skills within the entertainment industry is similar to what we are seeing in the U.S. workforce at large," Berger wrote. "We recently looked into the top emerging jobs across the country; seven of the top ten roles were tech-focused, with demand for technical skills coming from across industries. We may also see an uptick in non-technical roles - like animators - start to require more technical skills. As technology transforms the very nature of how we experience entertainment, entertainment companies as a whole will naturally continue to expand their workforces, and invest in their engineering and IT departments."