These are two separate stories – the lawsuit isn’t the reason for the layoffs – but they added up to an extremely bad-news day for US satellite-radio firm SiriusXM.

The company announced that it will be laying off 3% of its staff – around 160 people – in an effort to become (in the words of CEO Jennifer Wirtz’s announcement memo) “more efficient, agile, and flexible”.

“From uniting teams and better aligning initiatives, to investing in new technologies that will power our transformation, we are focused on increasing efficiencies and redeploying resources to support the strategic priorities of our business,” wrote Wirtz.

It’s the second round of job cuts for SiriusXM in the last year, since last March around 8% of its workforce at the time were laid off – around 475 people. The company has since relaunched its service in an effort to bring its radio business together with Pandora, its music-streaming service.

Talking of which… the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) announced yesterday that it is suing Pandora seeking “recovery of unpaid royalties and late fees” due under the compulsory mechanical blanket licence used by the service.

The MLC alleges that Pandora has “underreported and underpaid mechanical royalties” for its free tier, with CEO Kris Ahrend claiming that “our team repeatedly sought to resolve this issue directly with Pandora, but Pandora has refused to correct their reporting or royalty payments”.

Pandora and SiriusXM have yet to comment, but we’ll update the web version of this story if and when they respond. Pandora ended 2023 with 46 million monthly active users, including six million self-pay subscribers.