The next big social media trend? His abstract

“So I’ve identified a few metrics and KPIs that I’m going to start tracking in order to improve my overall life experience,” Farbod Nowzad says, apparently seriously, into his phone’s microphone.

He lists his KPIs, or key performance indicators: the number of smoothies he drinks per week, the time he spends listening to live techno music, and the number of rooftop bars he visits. I type to find out more. Someone by the name of Nikolai recommends that people maximize the “number of water taps that come into your field of vision daily” and the “number of times you can say,” I’m going to be used to it “and the make someone else understand. “More people come in, all in audio clips of less than 90 seconds.

This, for many founders and investors, is the future of audio: short recordings that are social, shareable, and empowering, or, at a minimum, make you want to listen and say something.

Several startups, including Beams, Quest, and Nowzad’s Pludo app, are betting their efforts and investor money that there is business to be done in this user-generated audio. Even the world’s largest social platform sees this as a possibility; Facebook announced Soundbites earlier this year, an upcoming product also built around short shareable audio clips. They all see what’s going on on TikTok – masses of people are making viral music videos – and want to repeat that success with just sound. It could be the next viral frontier and a medium that creates new stars and makes everyone big money, if any of these apps really takes off.

The best way to look at these efforts is to use them as voice note apps except your voice notes have a time limit and people can respond to them with more voice notes that also have a time limit. Oh, and the voice notes aren’t changed either. It’s like taking the social aspect of Clubhouse but limiting it with a time constraint, although the analogy that comes up over and over when I talk to the founders is Twitter, and blogs.

“[Once we had blogs] then we had tools like Twitter and Tumblr that took out all the complexity and just said, “You don’t have to think of yourself as bloggers, just type words in the box and hit post”, and that led to this unlocking of so much creativity, ”said Austin Petersmith, founder and CEO of Racket, another shortened audio platform currently in beta and which has raised a first round of funding, although Petersmith has not disclosed the amount.

Giving people an online microphone and a time constraint, he says, makes the approach to podcasting easier.

“Hundreds of millions of people are actively doing TikToks, hundreds of millions of people are actively blogging, and there are less than a million people actively podcasting,” he says. “I think that makes no sense.”

Racket limits people to nine minutes of recording, which they can currently only do on the web. An app is under development, however, as are plans to make the platform open to everyone. Petersmith says 18,000 minutes of audio have been released since the company’s launch this year; 70,000 people listened to a racket, that’s what they call the audio clips; and 17,000 people have registered.

But why the audio mania now? Alan Sternberg, co-founder of Beams, which he and his co-founder has raised $ 3 million, says app arrivals come from a confluence of factors: improving phone microphones, Clubhouse popularizing the idea of ​​social audio, and rapid speech-to-text transcription.

Notably, none of these apps offer RSS feeds for distributing content to other apps, essentially defining them as proprietary vehicles through which people can consume and create content. They really aren’t podcasts. Sternberg says RSS is a problem even because it doesn’t allow a social network to grow in one app.

“I think the problem with RSS, when you watch podcasting, it’s like decentralized technology that wasn’t designed to be a social network,” he says, suggesting that’s why apps like Beams must exist.

Meanwhile, for investors, the trend of abbreviated audio makes sense as a way to build on and improve the success of live social audio apps, at least in the mind of an investor. Jake Chapman, an investor in Racket, points out several issues he sees with live audio. Namely, the conversations deviate from the promised topic of the room, as does the nature of the conversation, and because they are live and unregistered, at least in the case of Clubhouse, the app cannot be optimized for discovery.

“I think short clip audio companies have a much better chance of success. [than apps like Clubhouse], “he says.” I think they can scratch the same kind of itch. So Racket, for example, because rackets are prerecorded, so asynchronous, and because they are short, the signal to noise ratio is completely inverted.

He also says that applications specializing in long-playing audio will have higher costs when transcribing conversations lasting several hours and maximizing discovery around them, compared to the short form.

Quest

Of course, podcasting has been around for years already and has his Big Tech moment now too. Amazon recently bought a podcast hosting company, in addition to the Wondery Podcast Network, and Spotify has spent more than $ 1 billion on exclusive content offerings and acquiring companies across the space. No one really thought podcasting was broken, but Big Tech saw an opportunity to capitalize on it, primarily running and targeting ads for shows, and grabbed it.

Spotify notably bought Anchor in 2019, undoubtedly the application that launched the idea of ​​mobile audio recording. However, it didn’t focus on abbreviated audio and was designed more to democratize the creation of podcasts, as it still tries to do today. Anchor tried to make its app a place of listening and creation, but never succeeded in making it a destination.

This is the real obstacle for these startups. Podcasts thrive when available on all platforms – some shows do well on YouTube, others find audiences on Apple podcasts, and still others on Pocket Casts. But these new apps and their founders see locked content as the way to go.

These startups face two main hurdles, however: Facebook, which will soon enter space and plans to pay creators $ 1 billion on its platform over the next year, and the unresolved question that arises. pose, whether people want to hear this audio format. Will someone actually listen to a stranger give them KPI ideas to optimize their life? Or would they just prefer a tweet?