Ariel Shapiro

First spotted by Podnews, new SEC filings indicate that Spotify chief financial officer Paul Vogel and general counsel Eve Konstan exercised options and sold stock worth $9.38 million and $1.15 million, respectively.

Spotify’s stock is currently up about 7 percent following the announcement that the company is laying off 17 percent of its staff. If CEO Daniel Ek is trying to appease investors with a new focus on efficiency, it is working. More than 1,500 of Spotify’s employees will be notified by tomorrow afternoon that they are out of a job.

Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast studio was once an industry darling, but has been gutted by three rounds of layoffs in the past year. Mia Lobel, former head of content at Pushkin, published a Substack post today that details the business decisions that pushed producers to make more shows than they could sustain and chase growth at all costs.

Life at Sea Cruises convinced hundreds of people to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a three-year, round-the-world cruise of a lifetime. According to an absolutely wild story from CNN, the company never actually had a ship and has cancelled the voyage that was originally supposed to depart on November 1. Life at Sea’s (now former) CEO Kendra Holmes plans to do the whole thing again at another company, much like how Fyre Festival organizer and convicted felon Billy McFarland refuses to go away.

A study by Reelgood found that between October 2022 and October 2023, the number of movies on Paramount Plus was reduced by 64 percent. The trimmer catalog is part of the company’s initiative to move toward profitability. In that same period, most other streamers built up their film catalogs, including Hulu, Peacock, and Disney Plus.