Earlier this year, just as quarantine boredom began to set in, Alex Marshall got an invitation to test a new app. Marshall, an investor at First Round Capital, hadn’t seen any of her friends or colleagues in months. But when she downloaded the app, called Clubhouse, she could hear many of their voices, as if they’d suddenly showed up at her house to hang out.
Marshall was one of Clubhouse’s first 100 users, and she quickly got hooked on the app, which works like an audio chatroom. She joined rooms with friends and strangers and, on one occasion, the rapper E-40. Sometimes, she and her partner, who is also a VC, would be sitting on opposite sides of their apartment only to discover each other in the same Clubhouse room. “It felt like a cocktail party where you could walk up to a group and eventually jump into the conversation,” she says. For a while, “it was my favorite place on my phone.”
Clubhouse’s timing couldn’t have been better. Audio-social apps have launched before, but never in a time of mass social isolation and screen fatigue. Clubhouse’s rising star, even in closed beta, pointed to something special about the medium. There was no scrolling on a screen, so you could participate while driving or washing the dishes. The rooms were open and transient, so you could wander in on a whim, rather than needing to call a specific person, like on FaceTime or Zoom (and hope they pick up). You could sit back and listen, or you could jump in and wax poetic. And because you could hear everyone’s voices, the interactions with complete strangers could feel oddly intimate—like listening to a podcast where you could talk back.
Clubhouse isn’t the only app trying to win your ears. Discord, which launched in 2015 and has 100 million users, decided this year to pivot from an audio platform for gamers to an audio platform for everyone. Twitter is developing its own version of sound-based social, called Audio Spaces. Other audio-first upstarts have also appeared, many of them with names that sound like alternative file formats: Wavve, Riffr, Spoon.
So begins the war of the voices, to see which platform—if any—can rise to mainstream status and shape the future of social networking. Social media has a way of disrupting established media. In the early 2000s, online tools atomized news publishing, as newspapers and magazines ceded ground to professional websites and amateur blogs and, in 2006, a new “microblogging” service called Twitter, where anyone could share their thoughts with the world, 140 characters at a time. Audio is tracing a similar trajectory. For years, AM and FM radio stations were broadcasting’s primary gatekeepers. Then podcasts appeared, and everyone from former NPR hosts to Joe Rogan started to make and distribute their own shows. Now, the emergence of audio social networks makes it even easier for anyone to broadcast their conversations to the wider world.
While the pandemic perfectly teed up an audience for these new social networks, some analysts believe the plot was already set in motion. Podcast listenership has steadily risen in the last decade; a third of Americans have listened to one in the past month, according to the Pew Research Center. Streaming music platforms, like Spotify and Apple Music, have also grown, with increasingly personalized options for finding new music.
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It’s easier to integrate all of this content listening into daily life, thanks to the popularization of smart speakers, headphones, earbuds, and other audio hardware. “We have headphones for different occasions, speakers for different rooms throughout the house. Consumers have really geared up on the audio products,” says Ben Arnold, an industry analyst at market research firm NPD. In 2020, the sale of Bluetooth headphones, speakers, and soundbars totaled $7.5 billion—a 20 percent increase from 2019—according to NPD’s research. The emergence of digital assistants on so many of these devices has trained consumers to look at headphones or speakers as two-way devices. People listen to their speakers, but they also talk back—and the widespread adoption of Bluetooth headsets has made it less weird to walk around doing that.
Naturally, then, audio-based social media has found a home in this ecosystem. Older audio platforms like Discord gained an early foothold among gamers, who needed a way to strategize—or trash-talk—with other players while keeping both hands on their controller. Now, Discord is working to overcome the misconception that it is only for gamers with a big rebrand (new tagline: “Your place to talk”). Clubhouse is similarly going for mainstream appeal. Its rooms are a mix of music industry chatter, speed pitches with investors, strangers vibing, amateur astrology readings. The model is somewhere in between leaving an iMessage voice memo and hosting your own podcast.
For these audio-social apps to grow, they’ll have to create spaces where those broadcasts are worth listening to. Discord has found some success by nurturing its non-gamer communities. Stan Vishnevskiy, Discord's cofounder and CTO, says all kinds of people used the service, “from small intimate groups of friends looking to share a meal over video to book clubs to Boy Scout meetings, and even large scale events like VidCon.” Other apps, like Clubhouse, may do better to cultivate influencers. “That’s what this space needs: the equivalent of the TikTok creators, who can take the content in a new direction,” says Arnold. Creative voices could also make these platforms stand out even after the pandemic, when people can spend time in the same room with their friends again.
People also need to feel safe on these apps, which means nascent platforms will need to figure out how to moderate user-generated content. Will Partin, a researcher at Data and Society's Disinformation Action Lab, says audio social networks will face the same big questions as text- or image-based ones: chiefly, how and when to censor what people say. But audio, as a format, may pose new challenges. “Platforms usually rely on a combination of machine learning, user reports, and contracted moderation teams to distribute the enormous task of moderating a social network with millions of users,” says Partin. “The basic structure for audio content doesn't change, but it does present different technical challenges,” like creating a large training database on audio snippets. “That isn't an insurmountable challenge, but it is an extra step.”
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Clubhouse, which is still in its closed beta, has already faced issues with harassment. (The company did not respond to interview requests.) And Twitter hasn’t shared how it plans to enforce its rules on Audio Spaces, but it already struggles with problems like abuse and disinformation on its main service. “One of the big challenges of open social networks like Twitter is that what's OK in one community is seen as wrong in another one,” says Partin. “It's hard to make a policy that's going to make both groups happy.” He added that Discord, which gives its closed communities the tools to police themselves, has had more success with moderation at scale. “This doesn't, of course, mean that issues of harassment go away,” says Partin, “but it strikes me as a much more honest, practical way of approaching the complexity of social life.” Vishnevskiy, Discord's CTO, added that the company is constantly monitoring the service for violations to the community guidelines.
Audio-social networks also need to figure out how to make them inclusive in other ways. When Twitter introduced “audio tweets,” a precursor to its Audio Spaces, accessibility advocates pointed out that there were no captions, rendering it inaccessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing. (Twitter later added transcriptions of audio tweets.) Discord has introduced some accessibility features, including text-to-speech and a better screen-reader integration, but only after users have complained.
However these audio-social networks manage their growing communities, they’ll need to keep them engaged once pandemic restrictions lift and Americans aren’t as reliant on virtual socialization. The audio format may be the next frontier, but there’s still a long way to go before it reaches mass adoption. Marshall, the VC, still spends most of her time in her apartment, but she hasn’t spent as much time on Clubhouse lately. The app is still growing, and its users seem to be molding the identity of the platform day by day. But Marshall, like so many early adopters, is already looking for the next thing.