Radio free Clubhouse
A small app that has been around for a year is having a moment, and if it moves fast enough it could transform the audio space in ways that threaten players old and new. RIP UR podcast.
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I don’t do when-I-was-your-age stories, but tech constraints dictated a lot GenX media patterns. For example, photography. It was the difficulty we had in turning a snapped photo into a physical stack we could thumb through that influenced how often we took and shared photos. The expense of film and cost of developing created a type of scarcity that made you think about whether it was worth wasting a shutter snap on that thing you’re seeing, but even if it was a worthy moment you had to finish the entire film roll and then go down to a physical store to get it developed. By the time you were rifling through those vacation photos, it was weeks to a month later. I realize little about those last three sentences makes sense for many people under 25. Kids these days!
The lesson, though, is that costs can be a barrier to creating, and it can stifle access to making and sharing things. Which brings me to Clubhouse, the hot app of the moment that you likely aren’t cool enough to join yet. It represents a change in access to the tools of audio media creation and distribution, and it feels like something that can do for sound what the iPhone did for picture-taking. Look what mobile photography did to Kodak, and think about who loses in a world where anyone can record and broadcast their voice.
Clubhouse has been around for about a year now, but this invitation-only app’s growth started to truly take off about four months ago. TechCrunch reports about 8 million downloads by the end of February, representing about double the number it had from launch until the end of January. The company has only a couple dozen employees and has struggled to keep up with demand, but as they’ve raised more investment capital they promise a more accessible product soon even as others such as Twitter are launching their own competitor ripoff/clone.
So what is Clubhouse? It’s an app that allows you to broadcast audio conversations to anyone willing to tune in. That sounds like a cacophony, but it’s more elegant than that. A user can host a conversation that other users can listen in on. For example I could interview a fellow journalism scholar on Clubhouse and people can listen in on the conversation by virtue of following me similar to how it works on other social platforms. The host also has the ability to invite the audience in to the conversation. The constraints and controls allow for the conversation to not have people talking over one another, which is essentially my brand image for Discord. So while it is a group audio chat, it’s really one that is more curated than the one-sentence descriptions in the news sound. I would liken it to attending a public performance or lecture, if this was being held in a physical building. Crucially, what is being spread happens in the moment. There is no recording function, and the content disappears. If you miss it, you miss it.
In terms of media? If this sounds like radio, well, yeah.
It can look a bit like talk radio, with a host speaking to the masses or doing an interview, while taking an occasional call. It can be public performance platform, with artists able to perform live music in ways that feel like in-studio performances radio stations have been hosting for decades. I would liken the experience to watching a live chat or a Twitter conversation unfold. You can lurk and listen in, and you can occasionally participate if the host allows. It’s all public, all performance.
Clubhouse is getting splashy love right in the middle of a big moment for audio in general. Terrestrial radio is on the decline, with even talk radio juggernauts on the AM dial experiencing steep drops in ratings as rural broadband takes hold and increases options for people to get audio entertainment in other ways. But where those listeners are going—podcasts, Discord, satellite radio, Twitch and now new apps like Clubhouse—is a big part of that story. Just as the death of local newspapers doesn’t mean we are reading less, terrestrial radio’s decline is more a story about audience migration.
But there’s another wrinkle here that’s worth considering, and that’s the lack of constrains that app-based audio has compared to its legacy peers. As the audience migrates away from AM/FM radio, those new landing spots don’t face the same types of regulation, which means they face new headaches that traditional radio doesn’t have to deal with. In this case, peers who distribute through satellite or the Internet don’t face FCC regulation and thus don’t have to deal with the same standards constrains. The FCC has for decades used its management of the public airwaves to enforce rules on things like obscenity and decency. These new spaces don’t have those responsibilities because they are unregulated.
What we end up with instead is a landscape that looks more like a free-for-all, until it doesn’t. The FCC doesn’t rule the roost in this online space, but as networks like Parler learned back in January, app store hosts and hosting providers such as AWS will have no patience once a new social network lets content get toxic at a scale that nets those gatekeepers bad publicity. Apple, Google, and Amazon are not a legal regulation mechanism like the FCC, but they are a de facto type of power that can shut down a promising app if too many users go rogue and expose the hosts to liability, to say nothing of mere ethical quandary.
At small scale with few users, toxic content is easy to manage. The lack of attention and small user base Clubhouse got early on meant it was easier for the company to monitor the worst of it, and even if content on the app was toxic, it was small potatoes in a way that wouldn’t incur wrath from the likes of Apple. But scale changes things, and it’s hitting Clubhouse now as the company is having to deal with unchecked conspiracy theory content. Harassment, racist speech, threatening speech and the like are soon to follow if not already an issue.
The unregulated freedom that has let Clubhouse grow means the onus is on the company to come up with policies and enforce them in sensible ways—something Silicon Valley companies are unshockingly terrible at. It’s maddening how old these problems are and yet how unprepared these companies are to deal with them.
Facebook and Twitter certainly are having problems with toxic posts and disinformation, and even though decision-makers were a bit too idealistic about speech and sharing early on, right now they are trying to repair a plane while it’s in the air. But if you’re launching a social media product and you don’t see those two predecessors as a cautionary tale in making sure you build and enforce effective content policies up front, that’s malpractice. Such is the Silicon Valley ethic, as daily user counts are prized and are at odds with content moderation that limits growth.
Still, content problems can be obscured during the gold rush stage, which is what we are in right now with Clubhouse. The initial set of influencers in a new social product are going to be people who are easy to find (people with fame in other spaces) and eventually brands. There are other types of conversations happening, of course, but the regular Joe version of Clubhouse and the influencer version will likely unfold the way we saw it happen on Twitter and Instagram—they’ll be on parallel tracks before those worlds eventually merge. There’s a growth-based reason for this. When you first join a new social service, the big challenge is in finding something to pay attention to. Twitter has highlighted this as one of their core problems for new users over the years, that it’s hard to “get” what is going on there if you can’t find useful people to follow in your interest areas. Thus we get a litany of products such as Moments, Fleets, trending topics, the spotlight feature, and topic following that are anathema to how old-timers grew up on the product in its early days of the late 2000s.
Anyhow, there’s a reason brands and famous people (if you can count Vanilla Ice as famous … AND YOU SHOULD) are crashing the Clubhouse. The lack of users who are legitimately good content creators make it difficult for the influx of new signeruppers to find something to latch on to. So they will be attracted to the familiar. It doesn’t have to stay this way, as TikTok and Instagram have shown. Apps don’t have to stick to presets for fame and celebrity to grow, and the unique new services indeed show an uncanny ability to create new categories for fame. That we even talk about “influencers,” these people who are famous for being famous, is a sign of how that game is changing and in some ways defines a new social media product’s staying power.
As Clubhouse continues to grow, it is going to change some things. For the record, it’s not a guarantee that Clubhouse will be the player that survives in this emerging sector. Remember Meerkat? It was doing live video before it was cool, before getting supplanted by Periscope and Facebook Live because the latter two were connected to established services that gave them a bigger instant user base. The same could go for Clubhouse, or the company could pivot to being an exclusive club for recognizable names while Facebook and Twitter specialize in accessibility for all.
But what Clubhouse represents is a turning point for a few sectors. As more services enter the fray, there is less visibility for terrestrial radio as it has to deal with new competitors online that lead to shrinking ad revenue for over the air product. The pandemic has caused some of this, as AM/FM radio’s best use case is listening while driving and we are decidedly not going anywhere. But it’s also generational. Gens Y and Z just aren’t doing radio like their older peers. The platform isn’t dying, but it is shrinking. Don’t sleep on a downhill impact on satellite radio either; the satellite model is subscription-based and thus more sensitive to churn than its land-based peers that rely on longer-term market trends to set ad rates.
But what of podcasts? I’ve likened them to recorded and repayable radio. A lot of what’s happening in that space definitely is radio-like. Podcasts have been around for 15 years and their growth has been pretty steady. Serial was the first buzzy example in this space, but when Spotify bought up a slew of Bill Simmons’ podcast products for nearly $200 million, it felt like an inflection point for the format. More listenership at the expense of radio has garnered more money, and podcasts for a while were unchallenged in their bid to replace what was old.
In that sense, Clubhouse and its ilk are disruptors of old and new. They have all the features of AM/FM or satellite radio, if they want them, coupled with other types of variety. Your only constraint is cellular signal, a problem that isn’t such a problem compared to 10 years ago. But they also have the creator accessibility of the podcast format. Radio was expensive to get into, and the ability to host something in that format was scarce. They weren’t just handing out hosting and deejay jobs. Podcasts, with cheap or free recording tools, gave anyone access to create things and made audio more democratized. Social radio has the same promise.
The future is where our eye should be, because it represents how the revenue will shift as audiences drift to new formats. There are two that feel like obvious moves as Clubhouse and its competitors grow their market share.
The first is the ability for premium users—this could be verified users or people who just pay for the privilege—to record broadcasts. The disappearing-content feature for most is probably good and even welcome considering what is being said in these unregulated spaces, but the ability to record, archive, and redistribute content is going to be something content creators are going to want. And it would give something like Clubhouse the ability to be both radio and podcasting, a flexible format for creators and fans alike. In that sense, Clubhouse-like products could represent the merging of two different types of formats in a way that feels seamless and flexible for user tastes, and honestly is just a simple button on the app rather than a complicated new feature that creates mission creep.
The second no-brainer would be a payment option, something similar to Patreon, Substack, Stitcher Premium for podcasts, or Super Chat for YouTube. I’ll even throw out OnlyFans as an example, because although it’s mostly known for porn content, it also has a celebrities such as Michael B. Jordan making money for regular content. If Clubhouse adds something similar, as they’ve hinted at, look out. They have talked about revenue help for creators, but for now that looks like paying creators from the company coffers; in this case I’m talking about direct payments from consumer to creator. All the examples above have in common the fact that they made it easy for creators to collect small sums for their work. It’s not hard to see the revenue model for Clubhouse here. Free broadcasts for all, and exclusive content for subscribers. Money for creators, exclusive access and the ability to create smaller conversations. Everyone loves VIP status.
The critical question in the short term is whether Clubhouse has the juice to strike while it’s hot. All the attention it has attracted has created demand for invites, but it also has attracted competitors. They have a window here to act fast and consolidate the market, but it’s a small one.
But in the long run, I don’t know if the winner matters unless it’s an innovation-stomping Goliath such as Facebook. Whoever wins in this space is going to cut into revenue going to existing players new and old. That feels like a sea change, and it’s something worth watching particularly with the younger users that tend to drive long-term social media realignments.
But no, I don’t have a Clubhouse invite for you. Ask Vanilla Ice for one.
Jeremy Littau is an associate professor of journalism and communication at Lehigh University? Did you like this? Please share and smash that subscribe button. Find him on Twitter at @jeremylittau.