Blog: Clubhouse

The gone and (almost) forgotten live audio app Clubhouse is trying for a revival. Clubhouse kicked off during the Covid-19 lockdowns, closing 2021 with a $4 billion valuation and inspiring major platforms, like Twitter, Spotify and Facebook, to start their own live audio-centric features.

The live audio boom in lockdown, primarily driven by Clubhouse, inspired many major platforms to develop their own feature. Most notably was Spotify, which acquired Betty Labs and relaunched its Locker Room live audio offering as Spotify Live.

As ever, the maturation of markets begs the question: “what next?” – and we have now hit this point with streaming, as the ‘ big bang’ moment of D2C video streaming platforms coincides with the slowing growth of Spotify and the pandemic-driven struggle of independent artists to make revenue on their creative output.

Facebook has just rolled out a new option to share clips of music videos to its Stories , which will be fully available to users by August 16th. The move has two main sets of implications. On the music side, we (should) have known that social music will be the next stage of innovation for the industry essentially since TikTok started rocketing users to stardom overnight, as meanwhile young people – digital natives who tend to be hyper-social – started to pick up instruments at unprecedented rates .