Picture Credit score: Patrick PerkinsPodcasting unions for Gimlet and Parcast slam Spotify mismanagement as the corporate lays off 200 staff: “Whether or not Spotify Studios has a imaginative and prescient stays to be seen.”
Streaming large Spotify introduced Monday its plans to put off round 200 staff, together with employees at much-loved podcast studios Gimlet Media and Parcast. This “strategic realignment” of Spotify’s podcast division has led to a joint statement by unions representing Gimlet and Parcast, calling out the mismanagement of each corporations resulting in this juncture.
“As of right now, Gimlet and Parcast not exist. Spotify knowledgeable us this morning that we’ve got been absorbed into Spotify Studios,” begins a press release from Writers Guild of America, East members at Gimlet and Parcast. “Spotify additionally laid off 200 folks right now, together with many employees unionized with the Writers Guild of America, East. This comes on high of sizable layoffs final 12 months.”
The assertion goes on to clarify how heartbroken staff are at each corporations, that when Spotify bought Gimlet and Parcast for almost $300 million, it “wasted the chance” to correctly make the most of the expertise it had acquired, “canceling exhibits with devoted audiences, leaving half-finished tasks to die on the vine, and giving groups little course as to what they really needed to see produced.”
“Spotify additionally made lots of our exhibits unique to the platform, limiting the quantity of income our studios might herald,” they proceed. “This has been tacitly acknowledged by Spotify, as management have since reversed that call.”
“Past missteps in programming, Spotify additionally refused to fund Parcast’s DEI Committee as stipulated of their union contract.”
“Our remaining months had been suffering from a scarcity of course and transparency, confusion, and bulletins that had been backtracked hours or days after being made,” the assertion concludes, including that some Gimlet exhibits will proceed manufacturing. “Gimlet and Parcast had been studios with imaginative and prescient that helped form our trade. Whether or not Spotify Studios has a imaginative and prescient stays to be seen.”
In the meantime, whereas Spotify has not formally introduced any Parcast cancellations, the unions’ assertion remarks that the layoffs show “an unwillingness to take a position additional” in lots of their beloved, long-running exhibits.
Gimlet, a pioneer within the podcasting sport, produced genre-defining exhibits like Reply All, Motherhacker, Homecoming, Crime Present, and Conviction. Parcast helmed quite a few standard exhibits with devoted fanbases, together with Serial Killers, Conspiracy Theories, and Supernatural with Ashley Flowers.