Introducing Discussions on Anchor: a brand new way to interact with the audio you love

Now you can chat (with text!) about whatever you’re listening to, right from within Anchor. Available today for iOS and Android.

One of the most unique things about listening to audio on Anchor is the wide variety of ways you can interact with what you’re hearing: applauding the parts you like, calling in with a question or response, adding audio to your own station, etc. We’re really proud of how easy we’ve made it to interact with audio and creators in ways that were previously impossible.

But lately we’ve been noticing that listeners want to be able to have longer discussions about what they’re hearing. We’ve seen people trading call-ins in an effort to have an ongoing conversation, or taking to other platforms for more in-depth (but relatively inconvenient) discussions. So rather than force our users to find other ways to have meaningful conversations around audio, we decided to enable discussions right inside Anchor. Here’s how it works.

Add your listeners’ thoughts as pop-up comments in your station.

1. Start listening to a station
2. Tap the new Discussion button on any segment
3. Discuss the segment you’re listening to with the station’s host and other listeners, as much as you want

That’s it. And if a host loves what you have to say, they can even add it to their segment as a pop-up comment so that all of their listeners will see it, even if they don’t choose to join the full discussion.

With Anchor, you can discuss any kind of audio: news clips, interviews, conversations, even full-length songs from Apple Music and Spotify. (There may have been a 500-comment-long discussion about Jay-Z’s “The Story of O.J.” during beta testing of this feature…)

Also useful: discussions stay attached to their relevant content, so if someone adds your segment to their own station or if you turn a segment into a permanent episode, the conversation will be maintained.

We’re really excited to see how this new feature will help support and grow the communities that have already been blossoming around all the different topics and stations in Anchor. You can check out Discussions right now in our app for iOS & Android. Got feedback? Hit us up on Twitter. Thanks! 🙏