layoffs
The Academy of Country Music held a round of layoffs on Thursday (June 5), with approximately one-quarter of the staff impacted, Billboard has learned.
“Coming off a successful 60th ACM Awards week and renewal with Prime Video through 2028, the Academy implemented a strategic staff realignment in an effort to support its future business and growth initiatives, resulting in the elimination of five staff positions across various departments including communications, marketing, events and community relations,” the ACM told Billboard in a statement. “We thank these individuals for their dedication and contributions to the work of the Academy.”
ACM staffers who were laid off include Alexis Bingham (coordinator, events), Lexi Cothran (senior manager, communications and strategic initiatives), Jesse Knutson (director, publicity and media relations), and Brittany Uhniat (manager, creative and content production).
Trending on Billboard
Prior to joining the ACM, Knutson joined the ACM in 2022 and previously worked in television news, including time at Nashville’s NewsChannel 5 (WTVF). Bingham served as an intern at the ACM before joining the staff full-time in 2021. Cothran joined the ACM in 2024, and previously worked for PR companies including Shore Fire Media and Sweet Talk PR. Prior to joining the ACM, Uhniat served as creative coordinator at Resin8 Music.
Nearly a month ago, on May 8, the Academy of Country Music celebrated the milestone 60th annual ACM Awards, which aired on Prime Video from the Ford Center at the Star in Frisco, Texas. Ella Langley, Lainey Wilson and Alan Jackson were among the night’s biggest winners, with Wilson taking home her second ACM entertainer of the year trophy. Meanwhile, Langley won five trophies and Jackson was feted with the inaugural ACM lifetime achievement award. The 60th anniversary ACM Awards was hosted by Reba McEntire.
Meanwhile, the ACM also recently announced that the organization and ACM Awards producer Dick Clark Productions (DCP) had cemented a deal with Prime Video for the ACM Awards to continue on Prime Video for the next three years, running through the 63rd annual ACM Awards ceremony in 2028.
Three months after SiriusXM pivoted away from its streaming app in favor of its core in-car satellite listeners, the company further thinned its ranks on Monday (March 10) with a new round of layoffs. The cuts came primarily in the company’s product and technology group and were part of the strategic shift announced in December, according to a company spokesperson. The company did not specify the number of employees affected.
Monday’s layoffs mark the third time in as many years that SiriusXM has cut its workforce. The company also laid off 3% of its employees in February 2024 and 8% of its employees in March 2023. The company described the previous two rounds of layoffs as necessary to build its platform and invest in technology to generate growth. Satellite subscription growth has stalled in recent years, though, and the company’s effort to attract new subscribers with a lower-priced streaming app brought disappointing results.
Trending on Billboard
In December, the company returned its emphasis to satellite listening, planning to “tak[e] steps to drive profitability and cash flow as we face marketplace headwinds impacting the company’s growth trajectory,” CEO Jennifer Witz said in December. At the same time, SiriusXM named former Google and Viacom executive Wayne Thorsen as COO in charge of the company’s product and technology, corporate strategy and parts of the commercial business. Thorsen’s arrival coincided with the departure of chief product and technology officer Joseph Inzerillo.
One of the products SiriusXM is using to bring in new subscribers is a lower-cost, ad-supported satellite service that had a limited launch in 2024. “In having an ad-supported tier, it gives us a place where we can market to these individuals,” CFO Tom Barry said Tuesday (March 11) during the Deutsche Bank Media, Internet & Telecom Conference. “We can bring them up to a higher price point as they appreciate and they increase their engagement in the product.” The full roll-out is expected to happen at some point in 2025, “but it could slip,” he added.
Advertising continues to be a problem, however. As concerns build over the Trump administration’s tariffs on China, Mexico and Canada, SiriusXM started “to see a drop-off” in advertising in the last “couple of weeks,” particularly in consumer-packaged goods brands, said Barry, adding, “I would say we’re cautious about where the ad industry is going right now.”
More subscriber losses are expected in 2025. SiriusXM is reducing its marketing spending on the streaming app and will “tighten” the terms of promotional plans, Barry said, which should result in the loss of approximately 200,000 subscribers this year. That drop would follow a 4% decline in subscribers in 2024, when SiriusXM revenue fell 3% to $8.7 billion.
Audacy, the second-biggest broadcast company after iHeartMedia, laid off 200 employees this week, according to a radio business source. “Audacy has made workforce reductions to ensure a strong and resilient future for the business,” added a company spokesperson, who wouldn’t confirm or elaborate on the layoffs. “We are streamlining resources to stay competitive in a rapidly […]
Sonos, the audio technology company known for its elegant, compact speakers, has laid off approximately 200 people, the company announced on Wednesday (Feb. 5).
The restructuring follows the layoffs of 100 employees — about 6% of Sonos’ workforce at the time — in August 2024 after a disastrous rollout of a new smartphone app forced the company to lower sales projections and delay product launches. In the wake of the problems, CEO Patrick Spence resigned in January and was replaced by interim CEO Tom Conrad, Pandora’s chief technology officer during the groundbreaking internet radio service’s early years.
In a letter to employees posted on the Sonos website, Conrad explained that the company needed to reshape its organizational structure to become more efficient. “One thing I’ve observed first hand is that we’ve become mired in too many layers that have made collaboration and decision-making harder than it needs to be,” Conrad wrote. “So across the company today we are reorganizing into flatter, smaller, and more focused teams.
Trending on Billboard
“Most significantly, we are reorganizing our Product organization into functional groups for Hardware, Software, Design, Quality and Operations, and away from dedicated business units devoted to individual product categories,” he continued. “With this simpler organization in place, cross-functional project teams will come together to improve our core experience and deliver new products. Being smaller and more focused will require us to do a much better job of prioritizing our work — lately we’ve let too many projects run under a cloud of half-commitment. We’re going to fix this too.”
The company’s woes are evident in its financial statements. In fiscal year 2024 (ended Sept. 30, 2024), Sonos’ revenue dropped 8.3% from the prior year and came in 13.4% below fiscal 2022’s revenue. Over that time span, a $67.4 million net profit turned into a $38.1 million net loss despite Sonos reaching a high of 3.08 products per household, up from 3.05 in fiscal 2023, and being in 16.3 million homes. In addition to music-focused speakers, Sonos also sells “soundbar” speakers for TVs and in May 2024 launched a luxury headphone, Sonos Ace.
With news of the layoffs hitting after markets closed on Wednesday, Sonos shares fell 2.2%, to $13.95, in after-hours trading. The stock is well below its 52-week high of $19.76 set in March 2024 but has reclaimed some losses after falling to a low of $10.23 in August. Sonos hit an all-time high of $44.72 on April 14, 2021.
HipHopWired Featured Video
Source: The Washington Post / Getty
CNN is embarking on a massive round of job cuts, citing a new restructuring plan by its CEO to focus on a digital-based future.
According to reports, CNN has announced its plans for massive layoffs within the company. The news was delivered to employees in a memo from CEO Mark Thompson Thursday (Jan. 23), in advance of the network restructuring to be better modernized for a digital-based audience. It comes a year after the network, which is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, already enacted a round of layoffs leading to the exit of 100 employees. That represented 2.9% of the 3,500-member worldwide workforce at the time.
“I know that whatever the total number of job losses, the impact on the individuals involved can be immense,” Thompson wrote in the memo. “The process of change is essential if we’re to thrive in the future, but I both acknowledge and regret its very real human consequences.” CNN is laying 200 people, representing a cut of 6% to its workforce. The layoffs will not affect the network’s more recognizable names, as they are under contract.
Former Fox News host Chris Wallace and Alysin Camarota, who were prominent figures on CNN, recently left after their contracts expired.
The restructuring plan includes a goal to reach $1 billion in revenue by 2030. Part of that plan is to hire at least 100 people in the upcoming months to build a stronger digital presence focused on “new high-quality journalism and storytelling.” This will also include work on a “lifestyle-oriented digital product” in development by CNN. It follows the company installing a digital paywall on its website for the first time for consistently heavy users, who can access it at a monthly price of $3.99.
One outspoken opinion on the move was expressed by President Donald Trump, who mentioned it while bashing the MSNBC network on his Truth Social media platform Wednesday evening (Jan. 22): “MSDNC is even worse than CNN. They shouldn’t even have a right to broadcast — Only in America!”
In 2024, radio gained a massive star: Shaboozey. Thanks to an ambitious five-format strategy by the EMPIRE label to break “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” to the widest possible audience, the singer-songwriter’s signature track hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in July and remained there for a record-tying 19 weeks, making radio history along […]
CD Baby, one of the biggest do-it-yourself distribution services in the industry, laid off members of its creator services team last week, a source close to the matter tells Billboard. Responsible for providing customer support, this team is now being “consolidat[ed]” in an effort to “re-allocat[e] resources” within the company, says a spokesperson for CD Baby.
News of CD Baby’s employment cuts echo the recent news that Distrokid was placing 37 union employees responsible for quality control and customer service on “administrative leave.” These roles were to be outsourced to contractors, located internationally. Its other competitor, TuneCore, was recently sued by UMG in a landmark $500 million lawsuit for allegedly allowing its users to distribute songs that clearly infringed on UMG’s copyrights to streaming services.
Over the last year or so, a number of music businesses, even beyond the realm of DIY distribution, have restructured their companies, leaving hundreds, if not thousands, of music professionals on the search for new jobs. This year alone, UMG completely restructured its recorded music division, laying off hundreds of employees. WMG followed suit with similar restructuring of Atlantic Music Group and layoffs. WMG also shut down LEVEL, one of its distributors. In late 2023, BMG laid off “dozens” in its film/tv, theatrical and international marketing departments.
Trending on Billboard
A spokesperson for CD Baby replied to Billboard’s request for comment, saying: “In an effort to support the changing needs of artists and the industry, we are consolidating certain CD Baby functions within Downtown and re-allocating resources towards long-term growth opportunities. Unfortunately, this has resulted in the elimination of certain roles and positions at CD Baby. We want to recognize the achievements of these staff members during their tenure with CD Baby. Their dedication to innovation helped CD Baby to become a globally recognized leader in the distribution space. Going forward, we will stay committed to this music-first and pioneering approach, building the services that benefit artists today and in the future.”
CD Baby has helped independent musicians get their music out since its founding in 1998. In the intervening years, it has become one of the pioneers and leaders of the DIY distributor market, democratizing the music business and opening it up to musicians of all backgrounds. CD Baby, and the other services owned by its parent company AVL Digital Group, sold to Downtown Music Holdings in 2021 for a reported $200 million dollars. At the time, CD Baby’s then-CEO Tracy Maddux said of the deal: “This transaction will allow us to take the services we offer the independent music community to the next level.”
The world’s biggest broadcast company, iHeartMedia, has laid off another round of employees in recent days, as the debt-plagued radio industry continues to contract during the music-streaming era. “Right now, it seems like the business model they’ve had the last few years, of making one person do 40 people’s jobs, is where it’s going,” says Nick Jordan, an assistant program director of Raleigh, N.C., country station WNCB until he lost his iHeart job Monday (Nov. 4). “But we did a good job, for as long as we could, keeping everything local and community-oriented.”
A rep for iHeart, which owns 860 stations in 160 U.S. markets and advertises “there’s a local iHeartRadio station virtually everywhere,” would not specify the number of recent layoffs, which follows a wave of job cuts in March and others since the pandemic. Radio-news outlets such as Radio and Music Pros and Barrett Media have listed more than a dozen laid-off names this week, including morning-show hosts, promotion and programming execs and big-city regional directors. Jordan said he was watching a video Monday morning of Bill Squire, an iHeart colleague who lost his job in Cleveland, when “one of the big bosses” walked into his own station to deliver the news.
Trending on Billboard
“S— happens,” says Jordan, 31, a nine-year industry veteran. “It’s part of the radio business.”
Although radio listenership has declined, according to some studies, the business remains resilient, drawing 82% of adult Americans as of 2022. And while major labels such as Universal and Atlantic have correspondingly laid off radio-promotion employees over the past year, the medium is still important for breaking hits, especially in country and other genres.
According to Wendy Goldberg, an iHeart spokesperson, “very few jobs” have been affected in the 10,000-employee company. She rebuts data that suggests a decline in audience consumption.
“Our broadcast radio audience has more listeners than it did 10 years ago,” she says, citing a Nielsen study that shows that younger listeners increased slightly in the third quarter of this year. She adds that iHeart remains “the No. 1 podcast publisher, bigger than the next two combined, and we’re five times the size of the next largest digital-radio service.”
“We’ve been able to achieve this by modernizing the company and increasing our use of technology,” Goldberg says in a statement. “These changes are another step in that journey.”
Squire, a stand-up comedian who has co-hosted the Alan Cox Show on Cleveland rock station WMMR since 2013, received the news of his layoff by phone Monday a.m. “They assured me it’s not performance-based: ‘There are big cuts across the company and there’s nothing they can do,’” he recalls.
Squire, who plans to return to the road as a touring comic, promoting his album We’re Getting Famous, says the radio business is “cutting costs wherever they can.” While Jordan is hopeful the “pendulum will swing back a little bit,” Squire says of media cuts: “You see it in radio, you see it in TV, a lot of Hollywood is out of business right now. The entertainment field has changed so quickly with the Internet and YouTube and podcasts that legacy media is just trying to catch up and figure out how to adapt to it.”
TIDAL plans to lay off additional employees, its second round of cuts in less than a year. “We have made some internal changes to our TIDAL team to focus on serving artists in the most meaningful way,” a TIDAL spokesperson told Billboard in a statement. “This involved the elimination of some roles across our business […]
DistroKid, the world’s largest independent distributor, has placed 37 union employees on “administrative leave” just an hour before the union was set to meet with company’s lawyers for new contract negotiations, according to an Instagram post by the DistroKid Union on Saturday (Oct. 26). The information provided in this Instagram post was verified by two employees at DistroKid.
The union says that these employees are set to be “replace[d]…with overseas labor” and that this move has impacted about a “fourth” of the company’s staff. Another source close to the situation believes the total is closer to 15% of staff affected. According to an employee at DistroKid, those impacted were part of the company’s Quality Control and Artist Relations (customer service) teams. Another employee claims there were also Quality Assurance Engineers impacted as well. The union adds in the post that DistroKid told them that the reason they want to eliminate these positions is to instead “to spend their salaries on marketing.”
In response to Billboard’s request for comment, a DistroKid spokesperson said: “DistroKid is committed to continuously enhancing support for independent artists around the world by expanding to 24/7 customer service with faster response times. To achieve this, we have identified solutions that allow us to deliver more scalable and exceptional service, ensuring that artists around the globe receive the high-quality support they deserve. This includes considering difficult decisions that may affect valued team members as we continue our focus on providing the best artist experience possible.”
Trending on Billboard
For the last year or so, DistroKid has contracted a third party customer service team, based in the Phillippines, to help with artists’ needs. This move to place 37 works on administrative leave seeks to eliminate its in-house, U.S.-based Artist Relations team and replace it with more third party and international workers. The company believes this will help them with the influx of international DistroKid users who need round-the-clock services in multiple languages.
The DistroKid Union was formed in February as part of the National Association of Broadcast Engineers and Technicians, a union within the Communication Workers of America (NABET-CWA). According to an announcement from NABET-CWA about the formation of DistroKid’s union, “workers at the company were subjected to a ferocious anti-union campaign that included multiple, one-on-one anti-union meetings and near-constant anti-union propaganda. The company president also sent several anti-union letters to workers.”
“Despite attempts to dissuade workers, they returned a vote 45-28 in favor of joining NABET-CWA. This effort succeeded due to the unified efforts of the organizing committee, which kept the entire campaign hidden from management until it went public, a rare early coup for the team,” the announcement continued. The DistroKid workers all work remotely, but their union joined the NABET-CWA local 51016, based in New York City.
This news comes after a few years of rapid expansion for DistroKid, which now distributes 30-40% of the world’s new music. Two years ago, it introduced DistroVid, which enables artists to upload an unlimited number of music videos to leading digital service providers for a flat fee. Then, last year, the company launched an iPhone app that featured an AI-powered mastering tool, called Mixea, to help artist prep their songs and announced that it had acquired music web platform Bandzoogle, an e-commerce business that helps artists create websites and sell their music and merchandise.
Update: This article was updated at 1:55 PM e.t. to include the claim that there were also Quality Assurance Engineers, a different role from the Quality Control team, that were placed on administrative leave.