Is Clubhouse a transformational technology?

Stratechery’s Ben Thompson – one of the internet’s keenest business analysts – explores Clubhouse in a piece that situates the buzzy app at a transformational point in the audio medium.

Why it matters

The big beasts of social media are closing in on Clubhouse’s idea, suggesting it will be mainstream (and therefore important to brands) in the near future. It is also an important story for companies like Spotify, which as Thompson points out, has bet heavily on podcasts just at the time of their transformation. More likely, its focus will be on premium content while live audio services fall to another player.  

How the internet works

Thompson’s article, which can be found here, suggests that the internet did three key things to traditional media:

• First, it democratised distribution, allowing people to write blogs for far less than it cost to print newspapers.
• Second, it aggregated all that media. Google for text, YouTube for video, Instagram for images, and Spotify for audio made it accessible to vast audiences.
• Finally, it transformed them.

The first blogs were essentially articles. But think of Twitter: a stream of thoughts enabled entirely by the above technology, Thompson argues, which was entirely new. As a result of its accessibility, aggregation, and snackability, Twitter moved into a mainstream position that blogs could never reach. 

So what’s new about Clubhouse?

Like Instagram, whose acceleration was helped by its stories feature, or the whole short video category as upended by TikTok – this process of something entirely new, enabled by the internet, is now coming to audio.

Audio remains a scale game

Podcasts are really difficult (and expensive) to make and most won’t be able to monetise, meaning the spoils will go to the biggest creators and platforms like Spotify.

“The most obvious difference between Clubhouse and podcasts is how much dramatically easier it is to both create a conversation and to listen to one”. The transformational aspect comes from these conversations’ live aspect, and audio’s unique position as a medium you can consume while doing something else.

Sourced from Stratechery