Mumbrellacast: Can ARN legally boot Kyle? Should Vinyl have bought Val Morgan Digital?
OMG, Vinyl is now the local publisher of Buzzfeed and its LOL quizzes
Welcome to this week’s Mumbrellacast, featuring zero serious misconduct breaches — aside from references to both Alan Bond and Donald Rumsfeld, of course.
It’s been quite the week in radio-land, with ARN using the dump button on Kyle Sandilands for “serious misconduct” which is, of course, legalese for “teasing his co-host for believing in star charts”.
We smashed the glass and issued an emergency podcast on Tuesday evening shortly after ARN dropped the bombshell that the Kyle and Jackie O show is no more — you can listen to that here — but today we investigate what is likely to be a long and drawn out legal battle between Sandilands and his former station.
Victoria-Jane Otavski from Blackbay Lawyers unpacks all the legal elements for us, and looks at whether or not the network actually has a case for alleging serious misconduct in breach of his contract. As she asks, how can someone remedy a behavioural breach that’s already happened — without using some serious time-space misconduct.
This week Mumbrella broke the story that Australian content platform Envato was sacking up to a third of its workers. Envato has flown under the radar for many, but for certain creatives it provides songs, sounds, stock imagery, and photography — paying billions out to the creatives who made the original pieces, while providing a rich content library to those who need it.
It was bought by Shutterstock last year for a whopping US$245m, so this is a major Australian start-up success story gone slightly pear-shaped. We look at why it needed to make such a drastic downsizing, and whether or not AI has reared its mechanical head (spoiler: it has).
Finally, we look at Vinyl Group’s acquisition of Val Morgan Digital, which will see the media company add Buzzfeed, Ladbible, Popsugar, Vox Media, and Choctop Monthly to its growing stable of brands (fair enough, I made up Choctop Monthly).
We wonder aloud whether the $7m (plus $3.5m in Vinyl stock) was too much to pay, or if this is all part of the masterplan to build a media stable to fuel the company’s music tech dreams?
Happy listening!
Get the latest episode every Wednesday.
