Hey, this is Madalyn Sklar and Suze Cooper and you're listening to All Things Audio.

Suze Cooper

Let's jump right in. We start with some amazing news. Madalyn, this is one that you came across during the week. What have you found out from Andrew this week?

Madalyn Sklar 0:23

Yeah, Spaces Dashboard. They have made a huge announcement that there's now over 1 million spaces hosts on Twitter. And I'm blown away. You know, recently Andrew was hinting how close we were to hitting a million. I mean, when you try to think of that number, like that many people that have hosted rooms in the past year and a half is mind blowing. Because I just don't it just hard to imagine that space is is really that huge. And having that we know is huge. We know it's an impact, huge impact. But 1 million, that's a humongous number. So it's happened. And in the second tweet I put up here in the nest because there's a link and you tap on that or click on it. And you can see like, as of right now, what are the current stats with Twitter spaces through the spaces dashboard. And unless you know like right now, there's Live Spaces 2480 Live Spaces right now with 61,000 participants, and 8100 speakers, which is mind blowing. And as you scroll through this, it lets you know how many upcoming spaces how many have ended how many spaces creators, which is what this tweet was about?

How many creators in the last seven days in the last 24 hours and even ticketed spaces? And this is so interesting, Suze because we've never really like knowing what the numbers were with ticketed spaces. I was curious if people were using it. How often and it lets you know that there's been a total of 687 ticketed spaces. So there are people using it.

Suze Cooper 2:01

Yeah, I think it must be such a tiny group. I mean, when you think about the numbers you've just given there, and then really in relation to that, that tiny number of ticketed spaces that might be happening. I mean, I've been on the waitlist for just about forever since the day they announced it. And I still go in there and hit the monetisation thing in the settings. And it still says, yep, we'll get back to you soon. You know, so I think they're obviously still testing it with that small group, people are clearly using it. And I, I think this is the thing, when I think about like a million spaces hosts just think about all the different ways or different conversations or different things that people are saying and presenting right here on spaces, really what we know and the people that we drop into and all of that it's just the tiniest tip of the iceberg, of what there really is out there. And I just find that so exciting. Just to consider that, but it's just that number 1 million hosts, that is just incredible.

Madalyn Sklar 3:01

It really is. So I love that Spaces Dashboard has a page here of just the stat so you could always go in here at any time and see what what are the numbers, where's it at. And I just love this, I love this page. So I wanted to share this in the nest with you all I think this is just a huge milestone to know that there's over a million spaces hosts just unbelievable.

Suze Cooper 3:25

So as we've said, over a million spaces hosts, I've just alluded to the fact that there's clearly going to be lots of spaces that none of us here have ever heard of have ever dived into have ever come across. And next to me is once again about discoverability. So during the week spaces, the Twitter spaces official account actually tweeted out one of their kind of pop party pictures of hands holding some binoculars in an eye looking through it a little face, logging in, it says ready to find a space. And you know what, I got a little bit angry. I mean, I get what they're saying I'm logging in, I'm ready to find a space and I'm looking around. But my response to it was exactly how are we supposed to find a space at the moment. Now my tweet response to this was verbatim this, the removal of the spaces tab in favour of the audio tab takes us back to square one in terms of native discoverability the audio tab is more listen to what we give you than Oh What can I find? I'm I'm kind of confused by the official spaces account saying like considering that people can still go in there and just find a space like I have absolutely no way of just finding a space right now. Other than diving into whatever the algorithm serves to me up on the spaces bar or whatever it is that I'm showing in a playlist on the audio tab. Now I get not everybody's got the audio tab. And I know each week I have to calm myself down and remind myself the tabs in betta room myself that actually the product team at Twitter have been, you know, really engaged with what I've had to say. And I've had DMs and things have gone back and forth. And that is definitely live conversation around them updating, changing the audio tab, but I'm, I'm really not liking it. And to say that you can just jump in and find a space, as someone who's really interested in spaces, and at the moment is limited to kind of seeing two or three pop up a day, generally two or three that I'm actually not that interested in, is really frustrating. There you go rant over.

Madalyn Sklar 5:37

It really is, it really is, I was quite surprised by this tweet, knowing that they're testing this new audio tab, they know we can't easily discover their algorithm is telling us what they want us to look at. And I love your tweet, I love your response to them. I wish they would have replied to you. But I'm not surprised. They didn't. But I replied to you. And I was like total agreement. And I even said in my tweet that this is causing me to go use spaces dashboard daily, and I'm okay with that. Look, there is something out there that makes discoverability super easy as a free website spaces dashboard.com. So that's where I'm gonna go. Twitter would keep things easier by allowing discoverability right in the app. But if they're not going to with this new audio tab, then that's where I'm gonna go. And the thing is that also said in this tweet, it just makes no sense to me. Why would you take away something that's part of an ease of use, like they made it so easy for us to discover, to do a search to, you know, get an idea of what conversations are going on? Instead, they're just leaving us with the spacebar at the top. Right. And theSpace Bar has never been that great. We, we didn't like it when that was all we had, we'd complain that like, Okay, this doesn't really give us much discoverability we'll take it, but it's not much. But if they're going to just leave us with this, this new audio tab, very little discoverability. For me, I mean, when when you look at that this new audio tab, we have to use what's in there first and discover people's rooms we already know about when I go in there, and it's the people I follow, or friends that have spoken in these rooms already know about, they're not showing me something I don't already know about. Are you finding that too?

Suze Cooper 7:26

Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I think it's pretty much confirmed that essentially what you're seeing is the spaces of people that you follow. I think that's kind of how they're doing it. That's how they're serving it up to you. But I just, I get that this is in beta. And that, you know, I might log in tomorrow, or I might go back to it in a minute having updated the app and it might be completely gone. Like I might have no audio tab, I might have no spaces tab, I might go back to the spaces tab who knows what iteration of the app I might end up with. But I think what's so frustrating for me is that I've got no idea how long this audio tab, beta is just going to look the same to me, I'm sure they're working on it in the back end. But it's not helpful in terms of you know, we've had about two, maybe three weeks now. And I'm not the only one there saying discoverability is a massive issue still here. And while they might be tweaking things, and you know, they've added your, you can give a thumb down to something that you're not necessarily interested in listening to and those kinds of things. I'm not seeing any big moves to help with the discoverability of spaces. And you know, spaces is a big deal for Twitter, really, we've just said they've got a million hosts using this feature on their platform. So why would you take away anything that is gonna prevent people from being able to access and find the content that people are creating? For start hosts, we'll stop creating it, because people can't find it. So they're not listening to it. It just feels like the longer they let this go on for the more negative impact it might have. That's what I'm concerned about. And it will be difficult to to crawl back up from that, you know, people are still saying things like clubhouse is dead, you know, oh, look at the stats, it peaked. And then it drops. You know, that was just off the, you know, the back of a load of stats that came out probably almost a year ago now. And people are still very much got that negative image of social audio isn't really a thing in their mind. It doesn't take much the minute people can't hear things can't find things. It's really going to have an impact.

Madalyn Sklar 9:33

I agree. Absolutely. That's why I'm just spending my time and space to dashboard and it's okay. It's like I'll do it. I'm alright. I just am surprised at why Twitter would do this. But it makes you also wonder how many people have this new audio tab? What are other people saying about it? I haven't heard anybody say anything positive about it. I've only heard people complain about it.

Suze Cooper 9:56

I think there are positive points to it. But I think the lack of discoverability for spaces outweighs it. And unfortunately, while I get that the audio tab probably isn't just there for spaces, creatives and, you know, hardcore audio podcasters. All the rest of it is there as a kind of browsing tool for people that might not know that audio has been integrated into Twitter understand that that might be their primary reason for putting it together. But I don't see the point of annoying the people that are actually using it and that are creating the audio on the platform at the same time. So yeah, it's, it's, it's odd. And it feels like of all the fast moving things that we've seen on spaces. They could be jumping a bit higher on on the discoverability. They I mean, it was what we banged on about for weeks, and for months in the early stages. And I just feel like we're having the same conversations again. And it's such a shame.

Madalyn Sklar 10:52

I agree. Totally. So, this next week is interesting. You're having some issues with the clips feature. Are you still having it now? Because your tweet was from last week?

Suze Cooper 11:03

Yeah. So this was actually pretty much after our space last week. And there's kind of two issues here. One was the fact that I was trying to use the clipping feature for the first time in a long time, since it had been improved. So I'd heard and the clip was actually talking about the autoplay on the audio tab and how we didn't like it. And I thought, right, I'm going to tweet that out, let people know that we spoke about it on all things audio. And so I use the clip feature. But when my when my clip came up, I had no captions. And I couldn't hear the clip. Every time I clicked on the card. It just took me to the main space where I could hear the whole thing, which is great, but I couldn't hear the actual clip that I'd just taken. So I don't know still glitchy for me. Just wondered if it was still glitchy for anyone else. I was kind of have the I thought that they'd done some improvements that it was kind of working a little bit better than that. And that you were able to be a little bit more specific about those 30 seconds that you were clipping. But yeah, certainly for me last week, it wasn't working seamlessly. So yeah. Is it working for you Madalyn have used it recently.

Madalyn Sklar 12:10

Yeah. So what's interesting, when I saw your tweet, it was working fine for me. And I remember replying to you to let you know I was on desktop, and it was fine for me. And so here we are talking about right now. And you know what, when you were first talking about it, I see it on my screen on my desktop is working fine. And then all of a sudden, it stopped. And I'm like, wait a minute. Now we're talking about it. And it literally just stopped in front of me. And so I refresh my page, and it still was gone for a second. But now it's back. So maybe it's a little glitchy at the moment. But I, I know I was very anti this eclipse feature for a long time because it would never work properly. And then one of my biggest frustrations was that when they added it on desktop, so you could see it on desktop. It wasn't obvious on desktop. So like you could only like now we know we can create it on both mobile and desktop at one time. You can only create them on mobile, and you can only see it on mobile. And then they add a desktop just for seeing it for being able to view it. And I was very excited when that happened because I'm usually on desktop more than mobile anyway. And I was so frustrated when they first made that change a while back because I wouldn't be on desktop. And it just looked like the regular Twitter card for a space with the whole recording. It was not apparent it was a clip. It wasn't obvious. But if you went to mobile and looked at that tweet, it was a clip. And I'm thinking well, why did they add desktop if they're not even making a work properly. So I just it just made me dislike this feature even more. And because I had so many problems with it anyway, I just wasn't using it. I didn't have anything good to say about it. And then all of a sudden, it seemed like they kind of flipped the switch. Once they made it available to create one on desktop. It seemed like it started working better. But I didn't see the captions at first and other people said the same thing. And then seemed like within a week or so. I think Twitter must have been paying attention or something because I know we talked about it quite a bit here. And somebody from Twitter was even, you know, listening to our tell him it told me they were listening to our Replay. And then all of a sudden that next week, it the whole thing was working great. I haven't had any issues. until just now and I'm looking at my screen while you're talking. I'm like, wait a minute, where did the text go? But now I'm seeing it back. So I don't know, maybe it's just a little buggy.

Suze Cooper 14:28

Maybe it just needs warming up.

Madalyn Sklar 14:30

Maybe, but right now I'm looking at it. And I can see. I can see the transcript coming up the captions coming up from your clip from your original tweet. So and this is on desktop and it looks fine.

Suze Cooper 14:43

I mean, it's a great way to promote a conversation that's been had in the space and I do really like the fact that they've added it on. You know, even the card is quite simple and straightforward. Maybe it'd be nice to be able to add your own custom graphic to it or round it up or whatever. But in essence, if it works in the way that it's supposed to work, it does everything perfectly. It takes a clip, it gives you the captions, it shows, you know, through the animated waveform, that it's something you can listen to. It's not something that auto plays, you can turn the sound on and off, and you can access the full space if you're then interested in that clip that you've previewed and heard. So it's got a lot going for it. And I really like it as a tool in the spaces hosts toolkit. But yeah, I just I just need it to be a bit more consistent.

Madalyn Sklar 15:33

I agree. So hopefully, they're still fine tuning it. And then we got clubhouse news. Now clubhouse is still making news. I like that.

Suze Cooper 15:41

Yeah, we have. So Michael Sterling, who's here with us in this space today, has posted a fantastic thread about a new feature for houses over on clubhouse that's in beta. It's called the lounge. I mean, I'm I'm loving the house metaphor. They're definitely going with that. Yeah, it's it sounds really good. I did jump into the lounge earlier today for one of the rooms that I am a member of, I believe it's like a kind of hallway. So essentially, I could have listened in to people that were in that room at the time having a chat, and then decided whether or not I actually wanted to go in and join them in the room. Prior to this lounge feature being there. You couldn't tell I don't think whether or not there was kind of a conversation going on in the room? Or who was there, although Michael might actually be able to give us well, I know he'll be able to give us way more information. And if I'm wrong, he can definitely correct me. But this thread tells us all about it. He says you know the lounging clubhouse, essentially a dedicated room accessible in the house hallway via a mini player. Upon entering a House members will see the lounge and whether anyone is in there. And if there's someone there, you can hear what they're saying. Because you're in the lounge. So yeah, it's a good way of kind of just eavesdropping on what's going on in the room. I suppose before you decide whether or not you want to spend your time in there. There are no mods in in the lounge. No links, no audio or caption controls. It's very, very basic. Like you can literally listening by the player. The room chat is enabled. But that clears once once the the lounge is stopped. So yeah, it's kind of like mini clubhouse in a way. So we've gone from you know, hallway and lots of public rooms going on, right down to these individual houses, you know, where people are kind of very much having more intimate more invite only conversations, quite regular space, room stuff going on over there in those houses, but kind of very much have very specific topics or ideas being discussed. And now we have the lounge. So yeah, very exciting to see them. broadening that out and working out what the next kind of step for the different clubhouse rooms and houses are over there. So interesting. But yeah, looking forward, if Michaels able to in a while to hearing what Michael has to say about it, because I know he's over on clubhouse a lot more than I am.

Madalyn Sklar 18:17

Yeah, it sounds super interesting. I definitely want to hear about that, too. And then the other piece of news from Clubhouse says long awaited block list. Well, that's sounds like a good thing to have to be able to go through and see who all you blocked on the app. I guess you couldn't you couldn't do that before you could block people. But you couldn't see the list?

Suze Cooper 18:36

I think so I think that's the issue. Yeah. So again, another tweet from Michael, thank you very much for bringing this to our attention. you've tagged it with things audio, and we spotted it. It says this is for iOS for now and Android coming soon, clubhouse users can now see who they've blocked on the app. So you can go to the gear icon for the settings when you in your full profile, you can choose blocked users, and then you'll be able to see the profiles of the people that you've blocked. And you're also given the option there with a button to unblock them if you want to. But it does mean that you can obviously see who it is that that you've blocked in the past. And yeah, kind of assess that for yourself and decide whether or not you want to let them back in. Yeah, of your own accord. So it's, yeah, a good feature. I think it's good to have that that list. I mean, I know here on Twitter, we've got a very similar thing. You can go along and see whose tweets you've blocked and prevented from, from being seen. You know, those kinds of things, I think are always good in terms of having the control over your account. And being able to Yeah, just just have that extra layer of security, I guess.

Madalyn Sklar 19:43

Absolutely. I think he's really smart that they did that even though I'm not really on clubhouse much. I like features. I'd like you to give us more than we need. Because there's something for everyone and most of us do want to be able to go back and see a list of who we blocked. Last week you talked about me sign up. And I love that you did this tweet. Just curious who else was using it Morgan chimed in. Y'all had a great little conversation about this.

Suze Cooper 20:09

Yeah. So this I actually posted over in the All Things Audio community was just kind of chatting about the fact that we've mentioned Amazon, having launched a web player last week, thanks to George, who pointed out that, although I'm here in the UK, and very clearly had the message on my screen, that it wasn't available in my territory, I could use a VPN in order to access it, which is very smart. It would appear that that's exactly what Morgan went along and did and he's checked it out, it seems very much of this, I don't know what it is, with these apps at the moment that they just want to offer us stuff, then they're not too keen on giving us an awful lot of choice. So yeah, it would appear that from Morgan's review of it that the web player doesn't let you choose what you want to listen to. It's not like you've got kind of a list of different hosts there, or even different genres of music that you might want to tap into. It's all about just listening to the stream that they are offering up to you at the time, you can skip the current stream, but you can't see anyone that's on stage, you see the cover up for the current song on that web app. And that's just about it. So you can sort of hear the stream as it's going on, and is the, you know, be a DJ social audio platform. That's how Amazon's trying to kind of put itself personalise itself within the realms of social audio at the moment. So the idea is that you can use the music that's available to you from Amazon music within your show. And so people are basically becoming their own DJ, and creating their own playlists, and presenting that, as you might hear on a radio show. So I think it's a really exciting idea. I know, it's not the full Amazon Music catalogue that's available to people. And some people have sort of had words to say about that sort of having a limited number of kinds of songs to choose from, or genres or whatever. But I still think it's interesting for them to be exploring it. It would be really great if we could just have access to it and have a play with it. Really, I would really love to have a go. But yeah, it's just not available over here. Right now. It is us only. But listening via VPN does work.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I remember when I first went on it long time ago, when it was brand new, it was interesting how it didn't really let you choose, it just kind of skips from stream to stream. It was different for sure. It seemed very basic to me, I thought by now they would have done more with it. But in this tweet from Michael Sterling, he says Amazon is all in with this as their social audio platform, and that he's already seen a couple of national TV spots for it, which I find interesting, because he says that spaces and clubhouse have yet to air an ad on TV. But then again, I mean, we're talking about Amazon, who is like, you know, crazy rich company, so they can afford to do it. Like it's nothing to do this expensive TV ad. But but that really shows that they are all in if they're going to invest that kind of money into their marketing.

Yeah, that's true. But there's also that argument to say, well, you know, people who were on clubhouse are very much listeners, and not viewers potentially. So perhaps, that's just an understanding of your audience. Like if I'm suggesting to someone who wants to up their podcast audience, I'd be saying to them, you know, your part of your marketing budget needs to go on audio ads, because you need to meet your audience where they are, and they're listening. So go to a platform where they're listening and market yourself there. And so for clubhouse that's kind of I wouldn't see them as being TV, advertisers, because they are completely all about listening and hearing, whereas Amazon is so broad, and has so many different, you know, strands to the business of what it does, I guess, as well as all the money behind it that, you know, a TV ad for for something that they're doing is completely different, you know, Outlook. But yeah, interesting to hear that they're advertising. And yes, as Michael says, it shows there. They're definitely not going to just drop it if they're spending money on TV advertising for it. So they've obviously got a plan.

Madalyn Sklar 24:17

Exactly. Most definitely. So you found an interesting article talking about Amazon live?

Suze Cooper 24:23

Yeah, I did. And in fact, my tweet doesn't really explain it particularly well. Now I look at it again. But this is actually an article from Insider Intelligence, which is headlined, it will take more than a creator fund for Amazon's live audio push to work. So this is actually talking about the fact that Amazon have created have a creative fund, like all the other social audio apps that we have, you know, so we've seen them all do it. Spotify, tried to do it briefly. Twitter spaces had their spark creative fund as well. The idea of this is Is that people on Amazon will have monthly payouts depending on their show performance. And kind of the crux of this article really was, you know, oh, Amazon's just following what clubhouse has done what Spotify has tried to do. You know, it's just another one of the same. And I think perhaps my, my thought on this is that right at the very end of it, they actually use the IE marketer, the Edison Research graph there to show social audience social audio services used by teenagers and adults as of January this year. And we, we did mention this at the time when the when the infinite dial stats came out, but you know, just 2% of the population using Twitter spaces, 1%, clubhouse, and 1% Spotify greenroom as it was earlier in the year, they're still very small numbers. I mean, we started this today by talking about there being a million spaces hosts. It's huge in terms of being here on Twitter, and users and all of that kind of thing. But in terms of the wider global world, and the content that is out there to consume, there is still an awful lot of people who don't know what social audio is, I don't know that it's available. You know, what Twitter spaces is, and how to access it. And these very tiny numbers show that. But what they also show is that there is just so much room for different things, different initiatives to crop up different ways of it being used, this thing is going to change and evolve, and it does every week, every day, as we see. And over the years, we're going to see this journey. I don't think it's going away anywhere. I think these numbers are small, but they're only going to grow. And maybe Amazon amp, you know, yes, it's a social audio platform. Does that make it a copycat? I don't know, it makes it another social audio platform in my mind. But just interesting to see, you know, they're saying, Oh, it's just copying. But when you think about the number of people that are still kind of unaware of what social audio is, and what it can do, I still think there's just so so far to go.

Madalyn Sklar 27:08

I'm with you on that, for sure. And then Spotify Live, just when I thought what's going on with Spotify Live and people still using it, then they go into the news, but by having this major crash on the server?

Suze Cooper 27:20

Yeah, so I picked this up on the NME site. So fans of ghost actually crashed Spotify live servers, which meant that they couldn't do a Q&A that they planned to do on the platform with their fans. Now, as far as I can tell, this was like an exclusive Q&A. Potentially fans were kind of invited along to speak to the band. Yeah, I mean, I'm, I don't I have to say I've no idea who Ghost are, but maybe that...

Madalyn Sklar 27:52

I never heard of them. But in this article, it says that they have 10 point 5 million monthly listeners. I know the cap for the count. And it's like, whoa, so they're huge.

Suze Cooper 28:03

Bigger than Iron Maiden. And on Spotify, apparently. Yeah. Yeah. That they appear to be massive. It says Go big deal. Yeah, go Spotify popularity stands at a 10 point 5 million monthly listener count. exceeding that of other metal and rock bands like Slipknot, Iron Maiden, Disturbed and Tool, I've definitely heard of them. But I haven't heard of ghosts. And they managed to bring down Spotify live. Now partly, you think well, all the different surveys, audience surveys, everything that we've heard about Spotify this year, it's all about you know, if you want to reach GenZ, you know, that's where you're gonna go. This is a younger audience, potentially ghosts are there for for younger audience, they're probably all over Tiktok. That's why I've not heard of them. But just incredible to think that they've, you know, brought down the servers, people are actually using Spotify live, Madalyn? I mean, that's the crux of the story. For me, that blew me away.

Madalyn Sklar 28:56

It's exciting to hear, especially with musicians with me, I mean, that when this first came out, that we I remember, we talked about how Spotify bought, you know, this app that was already in existence, a social audio app. And it was primarily for for sports fans, right? It was like sports talk kind of kind of an app. And I thought, well, that's interesting, but I would think that they want to incorporate music into this, like, how great that you chat with your favourite bands, like get the bands to use this this app. Have conversations have Q and A's, you know, whatever. Like, there's so much you think they would do with it. And it just wasn't happening for the longest time or like what's going on? Like they I thought they had this great opportunity. So to see this tweet the article, I was so excited, because like, wow, they actually had a q&a set with this huge band, even though I've never heard of them, but huge on Spotify. So this is what we thought was going to happen from the start. What did we start talking about this app over a year ago? It was last summer, right summer before last year. Yeah, except for 2021. Right? Yeah. It was quite a time been around a while. Yeah. And that is like, this is what I was expecting. But yeah, interesting that they weren't even equipped to handle, the servers couldn't handle as many people, we don't know how many people showed up, it must have been a lot to bring the whole thing down. So I played in the nest that tweet from Spotify live that actually like apologising to the fans, and then the band itself, saying that they're proud to have crashed because hey, that's actually probably kind of cool. They can say, hey, we crashed the servers. But they're also disappointed with the experience because they didn't get to have their q&a. So at least we know, is going in the direction now that we had hoped we would see because it is Spotify is like one of the largest places to go for music bands to listen to music, it would make sense to incorporate social audio, you know, as part of the experience. And this was exactly what I thought we wou ld see. At minimum Q&Awith bands.

Suze Cooper 31:00

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I have to admit, before Spotify came along, I felt like that was such a great use case for clubhouse, then Spotify popped up and I was like, yes, they're gonna take this, it's gonna be brilliant. And then to be honest, Amazon Amp is doing a fantastic job it would appear of, of kind of, at least presenting music in, you know, allowing you to incorporate music into what you're doing. What with that, and the kind of the anchor playlists that you can create podcasts again, leaning on leaning on the the Spotify, music catalogue that you've got there. And you just think well bring all that together Spotify live, you know, it's still a standalone app. That's still a bit odd to me. I don't know, they just don't seem to have got their act together with it, do they?

Madalyn Sklar 31:47

No, not at all. So hopefully, we'll see some improvements moving for hopefully they've learned some things and it'll improve 100% moving forward. Well, we'll see time will tell for sure.

Suze Cooper 31:58

Absolutely. Well, absolutely. Well, my last story is actually back to Spotify. But rather than being social, audio related, it is more audio related. Spotify is going to be introducing audiobooks to us users catalogue of 300,000 titles to start with, as I understand it, it's going to be in its own separate audio books tab, which even podcasts I think at the moment aren't, although I think there's been a bit of campaigning around that. And the fact that you know, that would be a really good way to filter out podcasts from the music content that's in there, it is going to have a slightly different setup in terms of purchasing, there's not going to be any in app purchasing when you're scrolling on your phone. So you will be able to preview an audio book from your phone. But you'll actually have to go online on on to desktop to make that purchase. The file will then be uploaded to your account and you'll be able to listen to it via your mobile device. But you're not actually going to be able to have that as an in app purchase at the moment. That's something that they're they're not doing which I think is different to what audible does. So yeah, interesting to hear that they're bringing audiobooks into the mix. You know, Spotify, massive audio company, obviously, already there with music, definitely trying to make headway with podcasts. I think recent stats showed that they're the biggest host at the moment over in the US it flicks quite regularly between Apple podcasts and Spotify. But I think they're up there in the in the top spot as it is at the moment. And now bringing audiobooks into the mix as well. So yeah, interesting to see them do that. Okay, let's chat about Clubhouse, then Michael, tell us all about the lounge?

Michael Sterling 33:40

Well, I will give my insight and if anybody else in the audience, looking at you, Morgan wants to come up to the stage. They can as well. But the lounge is really quite a fascinating little implementation for social audio, because basically what it means is that when you go now onto a house page on clubhouse, you are immediately in the lounge, and anybody else who is already in the lounge speaking you will start to hear them. And so that's something to be aware of as a user, if you're around other people, if you don't have headphones in, you could just start hearing people speaking if you go to check the house chat or any of the other number of other things you can check while you're in a house. So the implementation is actually quite clever. They they almost have like what I call a mini player on the house page, and in the mini player, you can leave the lounge so you no longer hear it. You can unmute yourself so you can speak in it while you're still on the house page. You can also swipe through the user icons that are on there. And you can see who is speaking at the time, who's unmuted, who's just listening. And there's also you can see emoji and GIF reactions in that little mini player just like you can in a room Now if you tap on the lounge, stuff that especially like the words at the top of it, it will take you into a room. That is called the lounge. And like you had mentioned earlier, there's very, very basic, very basic setup in there, there's no moderators, you can't change the audio quality, nobody can pin any links, it is just a space for people to talk to each other. And I think the idea from clubhouse is that people will first start chatting in the lounge, and then they'll say, Well, let's take it to an official room. And then you could just start a room in the house, you can title it, whatever you want, you have all the pinning, of links and audio controls and everything else that you want. And so the lounge is really just meant to be sort of that first touch point when you enter a house, you can start talking with other people and then take it from there. So yeah, it's the thing that I find fascinating is what else could they do with this little mini player? Where else could we possibly see it? Throughout the clubhouse app going forward? And maybe even other places besides clubhouse? I don't know. We'll see. But I'll close my mic there.

Madalyn Sklar 36:09

Thanks for sharing that, Michael.

Morgan Evetts 36:11

Yeah, I mean, what I can add is like the traditional big picture context here. So this, this is really a tool for community building. So for those who don't know, what a house is, is a collection of people who've been invited to be there. And it's intentional, it's got a purpose. So this is a group of people that that you want to be doing a thing with. And one of the challenges as a community builder is to try and get those people talking to each other, because many of them won't yet know each other very well. So you've invited them in, and maybe you know them because you've invited them. But they haven't really got to know the other people in the house yet. And this is the most lightweight, simple way to get people to have the chance to have like little quick chats with each other where they wouldn't before. So they don't have to start a room to do it. And of course, starting a room, there's a lot of psychological stuff there. And you feel like it's a commitment. And maybe you don't know these people yet. So do you feel okay, starting a room. But this is a way of like having these, like casual chants bumping into each other. So you basically you go into the house, and the house is like a group chat, and you're reading the chat and things. But you can also hear anybody else who's there right now, too, if they've chosen to be talking to each other. So you go in, and you're met with a live conversation of other members. So you might hear a voice that you've never heard before and think, oh, they sound really nice. And I didn't know that person. Maybe somebody says something and you think, you know, I have something to say about that. And I'd like to talk to you about that. So you can very quickly hop up and say, oh, you know, how you doing? Nice to see you or something like that. So it's these these these background connections that you need to establish between people in a community so that it really forms a community. And that's what this is trying to do.

Suze Cooper 38:06

And interesting that there's no mod there as as we've kind of mentioned already. So essentially, there's no kind of muting someone, but then you wouldn't necessarily need to because those people have been invited there. And so you expect them to kind of behave in a in a in a manner that in a public room, potentially people don't. But yeah, okay. Yeah, that's interesting. I jumped in, earlier today into the lounge over for the room that Michael has set up, over on clubhouse. And I guess what I was slightly confused about, I was the only buddy, I was the only person in there I was in the lounge on my own, which in my house is is you're never in a room on your own. So I was loving it. But what I wasn't sure about was whether or not anybody else who's a member of that room would know that I was there like do people get notified that there's someone sitting in the lounge by themselves? Or is it just if someone comes across? And you know, as you say they've jumped in to catch up on the chat, which is what I generally go over there to do?

Morgan Evetts 39:12

Yeah, so they will do but it depends how they set up the notification. So if they follow you or your Mutual's there's a good chance that they'll they might be told about that. But the other thing is, when you're in there, it actually shows up as a normal room in the public hallway. So not that it's public, but anyone else who's a member of that house might be browsing the hallway, and they'll see you in a lounge room so they can join that way too. So I see. Yeah, people do get a nice punch, but there's also different ways to discover them.

Suze Cooper 39:44

Hmm, interesting, Michael?

Michael Sterling 39:47

I think a good analogy that I had heard from one of the users on clubhouse was thinking of the lounge sort of as the mailroom of an apartment building, and you can have these chance encounters as you come in and out of the building. and say, Oh, hey, how you doing Morgan? Oh Suze Good to see you, you know, and you know, how's your day? What do you been up to today? And then maybe you're like, Hey, come on over to my place, and I'll show you this new whatever thing I got, or, or something that you can take it into another room of the house. It's still your community and that apartment building that house, but it's a more intentional space than just meeting in the mailroom, per se.

Madalyn Sklar 40:25

I love the way you describe that. That's awesome. Go ahead, Morgan. Sorry.

Morgan Evetts 40:29

No, just once again, this is an example of clubhouse has really changed direction. And they're using social audio as a way to have community and get to know people. And it's much less now I think, a way to build audiences and have shows. So it's just a different way that you can use speaking to each other.

It's great for community building. I mean, this is perfect for that, really strengthening the relationships with people in the community.

Madalyn Sklar 40:58

Thank you to all of our speakers who came on and shared so much great stuff, and we're available and all of your favourite podcast apps were out there all things audio, you can also go to all things audio podcast.com, as well.

Suze Cooper 41:12

You certainly can. And you can catch us here on Twitter and use the hashtag all things audio, and we'll pick that up throughout the week. So that's it for this week. But thank you so much to everyone that's been here in the space with us and those of you listening, and we'll catch up with you next week.

Madalyn Sklar 41:26

Bye everybody.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai