Midweek Creator News Roundup: New Hires & Funding, Spotify & Discord
Hiring across the creator economy, Spotify makes a dent into video podcasts and ticketed events and discord is the latest to enter creator frenzy
Welcome to the The Midweek Creator Roundup!
This is the Wednesday edition of Creator’s Digest mainly focused on news. On Sundays, I write a deep dive on a single creator. I’ve written about Emma Chamberlain, a TikTok talking dog named Bunny and Liza Koshy just to name a few.
My goal with this newsletter is to two fold:
1) to keep you informed with the latest news and
2) to tell you the origin stories of certain creators
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With that, let’s just jump into today’s roundup!
Today’s edition features some new hires in the creator economy and how Spotify and Discord are making key moves to position themselves as great creator platforms.
New Hires Across the Creator Economy
LinkedIn hires a new Head of Community
LinkedIn has made a few interest product announcements in the last few months to support LinkedIn influencers. Just writing those words after another feels unclean. But they launched Creator Mode in late March, a way for creators to build an audience outside of your own connections by adding up to 5 hashtags to posts and showcase content. Their creator product lead, Keren Baruch, said “With creator mode, if you want to build an audience past your network, we’re going to give you a chance to do that”.
Now, they’ve added Andrei Santalo to be their head of community.
He previously worked at Instagram leading product partnerships and strategic planning. He’ll be in charge of community and as more creator tools roll out, he’ll be the creator behind the scenes creating for the LinkedIn creator community.
Patreon adds a Chief People Officer
Patreon has been in the news lately for quite a few reasons. From a $4B valuation to Jeff Wittek, a YouTuber using Patreon to make a ton of money as pay-per-view, Patreon serves a global community of people and the team at Patreon is making it easier for creators to get paid doing what they love thru subscriptions. On Patreon, people are the product and you can pay a monthly fee for exclusive content or even access to your favorite creators.
Now they’ve added Tiffany Stevenson to their team as Chief People Officer.
Tiffany previously led the talent organization at Sephora growing and scaling the organization exponentially during her time there. She launched a unique program called SephoraIN all around diversity and inclusion. After Sephora, she came to Box as their chief talent and inclusion officer where she scaled culture and leveraged Box’s mission and values to reach multiple key distinctions including Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For and Great Place to Work.
eSports Org FaZe Clan hires a Chief Strategy Officer
FaZe Clan is one of the biggest gaming organizations in the world.
They’re one of the oldest too in terms of existence. They started out with FaZe Banks doing call of duty trickshot videos and have now expanded into almost a $400M dollar business including professional teams for every game and a whole slew of content creators.
Now they’re adding Kai Henry as their Chief Strategy Officer.
The move will be FaZe Clan’s first move into bringing on a strategy officer as they expand into new areas like music, luxury goods and leverage their current expertise to make waves in those arenas. Henry brings 15+ years of experience in music, fashion and artist management, specifically he’s managed Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube and Quincy Jones. Only time will tell where this new hire takes FaZe but definitely look to see more collabs between FaZe and mainstream household name celebrities.
Spotify gets into video podcasts & signs exclusive talent
Spotify has been quietly making some big moves. They announced a few months ago that they would be doing video podcasts and earlier this week, we got a visual of what it would look like and it is now alive in the Spotify app.
If you open the Spotify desktop app, you’ll see some podcasts like That Was Fun? with Addison Rae and her mother Sheri show up like this. As you browse the app on desktop, the mini player is playing in the bottom right so you can see the podcast as well as listen to it. It’s a great design and a great way Spotify has entered the video space.
Spotify takes a jab at YouTube
Currently, many podcasters would upload a YouTube video version of the podcast and put the full extended audio exclusively on Spotify. The idea being that the discovery is better on YouTube and if someone watched the video version of the podcast, they would see the text on screen that says “Extended audio exclusively on Spotify” and that would make the viewer convert to a listener by going to spotify and listening to the end of the podcast. From a sales standpoint, it makes sense. Now with Spotify getting into video, consumers don’t have to change apps or sites. Everything is in Spotify and that can be a huge shot at YouTube.
YouTube’s bread and butter is video - it’s a video first platform. Spotify is an audio-first platform so whenever one does the other thing, it’s a great idea as consumers want more content from their favorite creators.
In this scenario, a creator can double dip by creating audio only and video content at once by recording audio & video of a podcast and then distributing both on the same platform: Spotify. More and more creators will turn to signing exclusive deals with Spotify rather than posting elsewhere.
Spotify launches virtual concerts
Furthermore, Spotify owns music. Many people tune in for new playlists, new drops and more. A lot of live music is on Spotify so it only makes sense that they launch livestreaming exclusive to Spotify with some major artists in May and June. They’re starting with The Black Keys next week and have Rag ‘n’ Bone Man and Leon Bridges just to name a few in June.
Discord launches monetization features
Discord just announced that it is testing it’s own monetization feature to be able to support the creators that make up the platform. They are starting by launching a feature called Stage Channels (a clear Clubhouse competitor).
The feature will be built into the platform making it easier for creators to sell tickets to specific broadcasts. Stage Channels will have capacity of up to 1,000 concurrent listeners and some users in speaking and some users in listening. Currently ticket sales are only in invite-only beta but it is a huge move from a major player in the audio space.
Before this launch, many people charged access to private discord servers but the majority of those transactions were done off-app. Some were done via Venmo or maybe thru Patreon but now with everything coming together, the creator of the discord room can actually sell digital tickets to a certain audio experience whether it’s a talk with a notable speaker or something else entirely. Great move by a company who has been in the audio space for years and continues to be very popular amongst Gen Z and the next generation.
That’s it! Thanks for reading and if you have any feedback, feel free to comment below or respond via email to this. I love to hear from readers.
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See you on Sunday with a creator deep dive! This weekend is a fun one.
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