# Social Audio **Social audio** means live group conversations held on a social platform. A host opens a room, a few people speak from a virtual stage, and the audience listens and can raise a hand to be brought up. [[Clubhouse]] made the format a craze during the 2020–21 COVID lockdowns. Within a year nearly every big platform had copied it. Within three years most had shut their copies down. That makes social audio look like a pandemic fad. As a business, it was. As a political tool, it worked, and it is still in use. What defines the format isn't the sound. It's who controls the room: the host decides who speaks, for how long, and whether there is any record. Once the owner of the biggest social audio service was also a political actor, that control became a campaign asset. ## Boom and bust Clubhouse launched on the iPhone in spring 2020, invite-only and backed by [[Andreessen Horowitz]]. By April 2021 it was valued at about $4 billion. [[Twitter]], Facebook, Spotify, Discord and LinkedIn were all preparing their own versions. Twitter began testing Spaces in December 2020. On May 3, 2021, it let any account with at least 600 followers host one. | Product | Owner | What happened | |---|---|---| | [[Clubhouse]] | Alpha Exploration Co. | Cut more than half its staff in April 2023; relaunched as a voice-messaging app in September 2023 | | Spaces | [[Twitter]], now X | Still running; became Musk's venue for political events | | Live Audio Rooms | Facebook ([[Meta]]) | Scaled back and closed in 2022 | | Reddit Talk | [[Reddit]] | Shut down March 2023 | | Spotify Live | Spotify | Shut down April 2023 | | Amp | [[Amazon]] | Launched March 2022, shut down October 2023 | | [[Callin]] | [[David Sacks]] | "Social podcasting" app founded 2021; bought by [[Rumble]] in May 2023, with Sacks joining Rumble's board | When people went back to offices and bars, the audience for hours of live talk left with them. Clubhouse's founders said as much when they announced their layoffs. ## The political version Social audio's lasting use has been political. Each step gave a little more control to whoever ran the room. - **2020–21: the investors' room.** On Clubhouse, [[Marc Andreessen]], [[Balaji Srinivasan]] and others in the Andreessen Horowitz circle held large live conversations, some of them about the press itself. Andreessen blocked most tech reporters, which kept them out of any room where he was a speaker. On January 31, 2021, [[Elon Musk]] questioned [[Robinhood]]'s CEO about the GameStop trading halt in front of a maxed-out room on a show hosted by [[Sriram Krishnan]]. Details are on the [[Clubhouse]] page. - **May 24, 2023: a campaign launch.** [[Ron DeSantis]] announced his presidential run in a Twitter Spaces event with Musk and [[David Sacks]]. It crashed repeatedly and started late. See [[Ron DeSantis - 2023-05-24 - Twitter Spaces launch]]. - **August 12, 2024: the platform owner as host.** Musk hosted [[Donald Trump]] in an X Spaces "conversation," his word for it, not an interview. It started about 40 minutes late. Musk blamed a "massive DDOS attack" on X. He offered no evidence, and the rest of the site kept running normally. About a million people were listening when it began. Musk endorsed Trump and spent heavily on his campaign. Here the owner of the platform was also the host, and openly on one side. The arc runs from investors talking around the press, to a candidate announcing on a billionaire's platform, to the billionaire hosting the candidate himself. That's the "go direct" argument, that public figures should skip traditional media and speak to audiences themselves, put into practice. The press isn't replaced by the public. It's replaced by the platform owner. ## Why it's on the map - **Who controls the mic.** A press conference has reporters who can ask follow-ups. A social audio room has a host who picks every speaker. The format turns a public event into one the host curates, and it can still look open, since anyone can listen. - **Ownership is the moderation policy.** On a neutral platform, the host's control is limited by the company's rules. When the company's owner is the host, as with Musk on X, that limit disappears. See [[Musk Twitter-X Acquisition]] and [[Tech Oligarch Media Map]]. - **A network, not just a medium.** The same people turn up at every stage: Andreessen Horowitz funded Clubhouse, Krishnan hosted Musk there, Sacks built Callin and co-hosted DeSantis, Musk bought Twitter and hosted Trump. The format's history tracks the formation of the [[Tech Right]]. - **It's a stepping stone, not the end state.** Live audio has largely given way to video livestreams and podcasts, like the [[All-In Podcast]], [[Rumble]] shows and investor-funded tech streams. The habit of building your own stage instead of facing the press carried over unchanged. ## Connections - [[Clubhouse]] · [[Twitter]] · [[Callin]] · [[Rumble]] - [[Elon Musk]] · [[David Sacks]] · [[Marc Andreessen]] · [[Sriram Krishnan]] - [[Ron DeSantis]] · [[Donald Trump]] - [[Podcasting]] · [[Content Moderation]] · [[Media Capture]] · [[Tech Oligarch Media Map]] - [[Tech Right Group Chats]] — the private chats the same circle moved to in 2020