Have you heard? Skyrim Grandma’s next chapter, Spotify’s CEO shuffle, and a saxophone controller

Each week, we handpick a selection of stories to give you a snapshot of trends, updates, business moves, and more from around the creator industry.

This week, a legendary gamer puts down the controller, Spotify has two new CEOs, and Elden Ring gets jazzy.

Creator commotion

The 89-year-old “Skyrim Grandma” is moving on to new horizons. Shirley Curry has been one of YouTube’s oldest Skyrim players for more than a decade, but she’s grown bored of Bethesda’s hit RPG. In a video called ‘My Goodbye to Skyrim,’ Curry closed the book on her gaming exploits, though she didn’t rule out the occasional vlog in the future.

Keith Lee signs with UTA. The TikTok food critic is so influential that the so-called ‘Keith Lee effect’ drives restaurant sales and trends. He now boasts a new talent agency deal that will provide him with representation in all areas.

Forget the ’Talk Tuah’ podcast — Hailey Welch is Just Chatting. The ‘Hawk Tuah’ girl has taken up Twitch streaming so that she can have more manageable interactions with her audience. The resulting show, ‘Talk Tuah Live,’ will include some contributions from chat.

Platform headlines

Daniel Ek has a pair of replacements in Spotify’s C-suite. The platform’s founding CEO is transitioning to the executive boardroom. In his place, Spotify is taking a page out of Netflix’s book by appointing Co-CEOs. Gustav Söderström and Alex Norström have oodles of experience — and three umlauts — between them.

It looks like Adam Presser will take over the new U.S. version of TikTok. After succeeding V Pappas on TikTok’s leadership team, Presser led a reshuffling of the app’s operations. Now, he is being predicted as the head of the platform that will arise as a result of the U.S. TikTok deal. Let’s make sure the transaction closes first.

Threads wants to cater to your interests with Reddit-style communities. With its latest move, the Meta-owned social hub is incorporating current tech trends. Reddit-style content is surging in the era of AI, and Bluesky is pushing the industry toward community-based browsing, so Threads is doing what it can to keep up.

The latest tech

A developer figured out how to turn a YouTube playlist into a TV channel. Don’t like your choices on cable? Just make a custom channel based on your YouTube browsing activity. The instructions are here, though I can’t promise this method offers any utility that’s not available on the main YouTube app. It is cool, though.

AI bots are more likely to send referrals to YouTube than to any other platform. So claims a study published by BrightEdge. Google’s presence in the AI game via Gemini is certainly a factor here, though even ChatGPT is pulling more from YouTube than from any other source.

AI-generated Bollywood videos went bye-bye after a report called them out. Reuters located videos that resembled the uploads that sit at the center of a lawsuit filed by Bollywood stars Abhishek Bachchan and his wife Aishwarya Rai Bachchan. After the report came out, many of the offending videos were promptly taken down. Funny how that works out! 

Pop culture minute

Evan Shapiro brings a creator-led ‘Skit’ to Tubi. Shapiro’s EShap production company teamed with distribution company Filmhub to land a 30-day exclusive window at Fox’s FAST platform. ‘Skit’ is a comedy film led by a cast of content creators, including Nataly Aukar, Alise Morales, and Lukas Arnold.

For shy celebrities, long-form podcasts are the new press junket. As it turns out, socially anxious actors don’t love handling the rapid-fire question-and-answer setup of the traditional press junket. As an alternative, those wallflowers are now promoting their work via podcasts. I guess us pop culture journalists are chopped liver (or future podcasters).

Ice Spice is launching her own Twitch account. During Paris Fashion Week, the rapper kicked off her streaming career with a star-studded broadcast. I hope that fellow Bronx native and notable Ice Spice fan Kai Cenat is paying attention.

The internet is a strange place

A streamer beat Elden Ring by using a saxophone as a controller. When you go by the name Dr. Toot, what choice do you have other than using a woodwind as a gaming device? Toot is moving on to other games, but I’d like to see him try other instruments. The Any% recorder controller speedrun is right there for the taking.

Ore-Ida turned a TikTok trend into a new product. The food brand describes Croutots as “like croutons, but tater tots.” They look like someone threw normal tots on top of some greens, but I’m no food scientist.

Meanwhile, in Texas, a stray bullet caused an internet outage. 25,000 Spectrum customers in the Dallas area lost service after an errant shot pierced a fiber optic cable. The shooter had better watch out — in Texas, there’s always a chance the cables will return fire.