Social audio is not dead, it’s BOOMING!
3 reasons why conventional wisdom is wrong.
Social audio is not dead — it’s booming! Since the launch of Clubhouse just over 2 years ago, Twitter put social audio at the center of its app with Twitter Spaces, while LinkedIn is rolling out audio events to hundreds of millions of users.
Meanwhile, in China, hundreds of millions more people are being introduced to social audio on Xiaohongshu, and even TikTok is preparing to get into the audio space.
Despite such extraordinary adoption, the two-year-old medium is mostly maligned. Recent headlines include: “Is social audio dead?” and “The Rise And Fall Of Social Audio.”
While it is true that Clubhouse has not followed Facebook’s historic growth trajectory, calling social audio dead now because of one app’s experience is like proclaiming ‘social networking is dead’ in 2004, right before Facebook launched because Friendster had struggled for two years.
The reality is social audio has had one of the most extraordinary two years of any new social medium, embedded as it is in some of the most significant social networking products in existence. There are three primary advantages fueling social audio’s rise …
The 3 Fundamental Advantages of Social Audio
1. Social audio communication has higher empathic accuracy and allows for better focus.
Science has long known the face is not the primary means of communicating emotion. Yale University Professor Michael Kraus’s paper shows the primacy of voice-only communication in accurately assessing emotional state. The reason is the voice is rich with vocal cues like pitch, cadence, and speed. The voice is also rich in content; after all, it is through language that people make sense of their own emotional states and receive the emotional states of others.
We literally speak our emotional state, and through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, our deep-learning neural network of a brain has learned to comprehend and accurately assess the nuance and emotions of our fellow humans.
Over five experiments, the research found empathic accuracy to be highest in voice-only communication. Crucially, the study found “participants reported focusing more on facial expressions than speech or vocal content when both audio and video were available.”
As it turns out, we humans can’t help ourselves from paying attention to the face if it’s present. In contrast, voice-only communication allows for focus. Prof. Kraus continues: “less is more … voice-only communication, even though it involves only one of the modalities of emotion expression, will significantly improve empathic accuracy over communication across multiple senses.”
2. Social audio is lower friction to create content compared to video or text.
Beyond empathic accuracy, the audio medium also benefits from having lower friction to content creation. It is simply easier to record or broadcast audio content versus video content. For one thing, the creator need not worry about their background or their appearance; they need only worry about the substance of what they are conveying. The focus is all on the words spoken, not on managing appearances, lighting, etc.
Also, compared to text, audio creation is easy. Many people lack the ability to write effectively, but diverse people can deliver powerful and effective spoken words. In this way, audio may be the most democratic medium.
After all, humans have rich oral storytelling traditions dating back ten thousand years.
3. Social audio lends itself to passive consumption.
What’s more, as Spotify knows well, audio tends to be consumed passively, while someone is doing something else, like driving, jogging, cooking, working, etc. This attribute allows for audio to fill an immense amount of time in a consumer’s day. Social audio shares this key advantage with podcasts: it can be listened to while doing other things!
Taken together, social audio, as a medium, benefits from immense advantages. Social audio allows for better empathic accuracy and focus. It is perhaps the easiest medium for which to create content, and perhaps, most importantly, it can be consumed passively, allowing it to be used hands-free while doing other things.
In my next post, I will analyze why, despite these tremendous advantages, social audio startups have not yet broken out, and what is likely required to finally see one catapult to the top of the App Store.
Dayo is the founder, and CEO of the Wisdom app.
