What's Trending: April 4, 2023 Edition

A cast of Barbies and Kens (and their friends) make their debut ahead of the release of Greta Gerwig’s upcoming film, and Spotify announces the end of its standalone live audio app following a period of “experimentation and learnings” in today’s roundup of trending topics from Ayzenberg Associate Director of Strategy Chris Levkulich .

Life In Plastic, It's Fantastic

The character posters for the new live-action "Barbie" movie starring Margot Robbie have been revealed, and everyone is named Barbie or Ken. But the film also features human characters not named Barbie or Ken who will have a knee-slapping good time trying to figure out which Barbie or Ken someone is talking about in context.

TikTok—But Worse

With news of a potential full-on ban in the U.S., let’s look at how TikTok has forever altered the way social media companies engage users and how users engage with social media. In a race to compete with the fast-growing video behemoth, everything became like TikTok —but worse. As the Intelligencer puts it, “Where [users] used to see posts from people they know, now there are algorithmically suggested videos from somebody made for nobody.”

Spotify Kills Live Audio

Live audio saw a huge boom during the COVID-19 pandemic, with platforms like Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces seeing huge gains in users and time spent. Spotify even launched its own standalone app, Spotify Live, in hopes of capitalizing on the live audio momentum. However, the audio streamer is shutting down Spotify Live as its own platform but is reportedly still open to live fan-creator interactions within its existing ecosystem.

'Moana' Gets a Live-Action Remake

Disney’s “Moana” is reportedly getting a live-action remake . While the original film was incredibly popular, the news has generated some backlash , with many fans saying a sequel, series or spinoff would make more sense for the animated hit which was released in 2016. Making us wonder—how soon is too soon for a remake?