“Copy like an artist”: the largest social network plans to bypass the “clubhouse” in the audio niche
A couple of weeks ago, the Habr editorial staff published the news that Facebook’s management is developing and preparing to launch services that can compete with Clubhouse. We decided to analyze this topic in a little more detail and prepared a small analysis.
Fear of the new
The announcement of the management of the largest social network that it is seriously engaged in audio services, in fact repeating and even expanding the capabilities of Clubhouse, confirms a number of new trends in the media market. Firstly, such actions show an excessive fear of a media corporation to miss out on leadership and a desire to prevent the outcome of events in which a young competitor in this niche can quickly gain a multimillion audience.
Second, how fair noticed One Hacker News resident, Facebook’s top management, must be making significant adjustments to its approach to acquiring third-party projects and startups. The company will presumably compete with new players, relying heavily on the existing team. It will not be difficult for her to adapt the mechanics of the Clubhouse in her own way, and for a small team of the “club house”, on the contrary, it will be difficult to keep up with the pace of Facebook – the resources of firms are incomparable.
At the same time, there is a possibility that the number of transactions in this segment will decrease due to the cooling of interest in other corporations. There is nothing surprising in this – during a crisis, few are ready to risk investor money, and even those have long ceased to throw it around. This only suggests that the likelihood of selling Clubhouse to someone for four billion dollars – and even a much more modest amount – is falling every day and with each new release of similar functionality on board established social networks like Facebook, Linkedin, Reddit, Discord and Telegram. [о них мы говорили ранее]… Most likely, all of them will not be limited to current innovations and will gradually occupy a large part of the audio social networks market, minimizing opportunities for the development of new projects in this niche.
What do they promise
Facebook press releases indicate that its team intends to offer three new audio services. The first one – Live Audio Rooms – and the truth may be similar to the notorious “club house“. It is integrated into the main platform, messenger and will launch in summer.
Another direction of development is the transformation and addition of existing products of the site with tools for those who record and listen to audio content. These can be groups and corporate pages for podcasters. However, it is still difficult to say how they will be implemented: whether there will be new types of pages, groups and publications, or other ways to publish and discuss music and podcasts.
The Soundbites service will also be launched as a separate product. This is an analogue of TikTok, but only with audio tracks. The recordings will be of short duration and will presumably remind many of micropodcasts. And the authors of the first “bytes” are likely to become studiosspecializing in recording conversational shows. Another thing is that most of them are under the control of streaming services like Spotify. But Facebook plans to launch integration with this platform as well. While we are talking about new opportunities for discussing tracks, albums, playlists and podcasts on the open spaces of Facebook.
And not only this
So that the planned updates do not look late and could interest those who prepare and publish audio content on the network, platform management proposes and approaches to its monetization. Unfortunately, they are not new in and of themselves. Presumably, this will be an opportunity to subscribe to paid airs in Rooms and then distribute the model to other services and products of the social network. However, the site is preparing a dedicated fund for Soundbites and plans to use its resources to encourage content makers who are most active in working with the new service for short audio.
Among the social networks veterans who have connected to the adaptation of the Clubhouse functionality, of course, it has not been without Linkedin. [все еще заблокирована в России]… The site has previously launched Story-like cards from Snap and Instagram, live video feeds similar to Facebook, and extended posts like those found on the Medium platform. As you can see from the screen image that the social network team shared with the Techcrunch editors, no significant differences from the Clubhouse capabilities can be expected here. Linkedin usually tries to simplify adaptations of functionality that has proven itself elsewhere, but it rarely comes out of it that really interesting to the audience.
What else do we have for Hi-Fi World:
Many are unhappy with the largest video hosting service, but continue to use it
Streaming services would like to find new approaches to working with music
“Playlist” has captured the minds of music publishers and podcasts
The podcast industry is becoming more like streaming TV shows and movies
In our blog on Habré:
Two advanced packs with hobbyist recording devices
A couple of available bundles with audio recording devices
