Top music-industry tastemakers are hanging out in Clubhouse. Why?

If you’re in the tech-startup world, you may have heard about a new social-audio app that everyone loves to hate called Clubhouse.

Founded by seasoned tech entrepreneurs Paul Davison and Rohan Seth, Clubhouse operates like an audio-only version of Houseparty, whereby people can spontaneously join or listen in on audio chat rooms with others they follow on the app.

As of my writing this, Clubhouse has only around 5,000 beta users, and is not yet available to the public. But that hasn’t stopped The New York Times, CNBC, TechCrunch, Forbes and WIRED from covering the company, with a focus on the widespread sense of FOMO that comes with its exclusivity. VC firm Andreessen Horowitz won a bid to invest in Clubhouse’s Series A round, which values the startup at $100 million.

One under-reported element amidst all this buzz is that some of the most popular conversations in Clubhouse over the past few weeks have featured powerhouses at the intersection of tech and culture — and specifically at the intersection of tech and music.

When I got an invite to join the Clubhouse app about a month ago, I felt a bit out of place. Most of the conversations in the app at the time were among tech founders and investors, and concerned some combination of COVID-19, startups and Clubhouse itself. The whole experience felt rather insular and esoteric.

But then I started seeing a lot more names that I recognized from the business of culture. Major artist-management veterans with deep pockets in tech, including Scooter Braun, Troy Carter, Guy Oseary and Jake Udell, have chatted in Clubhouse over the past few weeks, often alongside other investors and entertainment executives. Celebrities such as Jared Leto, Ashton Kutcher and Tiffany Haddish, as well as early hip-hop pioneers Fab 5 Freddy, MC Hammer and E40 have also made frequent appearances. Beyond A-listers, I’ve also “run into” many of my peers on Clubhouse whom I had met before via interviews, industry conferences and social media.

As Forbes reported, Chris Lyons, who leads Andreessen Horowitz’s Cultural Leadership Fund — which includes Chance the Rapper, Nas, Quincy Jones and Shonda Rhimes as limited partners — had a hand in bringing cultural tastemakers onto the app. The VC firm’s co-founder and general partner Ben Horowitz is also a known hip-hop fanatic. (If you haven’t already noticed… Clubhouse’s celebrity clientele also skews heavily male.)

Importantly, the majority of the conversations that celebs and execs are having in Clubhouse are not about music. Instead, they’re discussing current events and sociopolitical issues, sharing funny stories about their families or childhood and exchanging advice for navigating the ongoing pandemic. Also, the unspoken shared agreement among all users (which I am following) is that conversations are off-the-record, which allows for more spontaneous, unscripted and memorable perspectives than what you might find in the press.

Whatever you think about Clubhouse right now, there are a lot of lessons the music industry as a whole could learn from its early activity. As many artists and their teams are trying to figure out what comprises a compelling live or social experience online, and what excites people outside of music about the next big wave of consumer tech, Clubhouse provides one of many potential blueprints for the future.

Social audio and social music listening are making a comeback

As outlined in my Virtual Music Events Directory, there are dozens of tools out there now for artists to host their own livestreamed events.

The most popular tools, like Twitch, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, focus on live video. But like how many working professionals don’t want to spend all of their business days on Zoom anymore, there are likely many artists out there who feel exhausted doing so many video livestreams week after week, and who would prefer to answer questions from fans or perform “over the airwaves” in the audio-only style of traditional radio.

In this vein, an ecosystem of live, social audio streaming is now emerging. There are live, audio-only streaming tools like Mixlr and Gramrphone that artists can embed on their own websites; free talk-radio apps like Stationhead that run on top of Spotify and Apple Music; premium, hand-curated, genre-specific radio experiences like Gimme Radio and Gimme Country that have live chat and other community features; and live voice-chat functionalities within social messaging apps like Discord.

Social listening experiences à la Turntable.fm are also returning, with alternatives like plug.dj and JQBX allowing groups of people to pull songs from Spotify and YouTube into a shared queue. Even Spotify itself is moving in a more social direction with the launch of its shared-queue feature, Group Session.

In other words, the seeds are planted for social, audio-driven listening experiences to make a comeback in music culture.

On Clubhouse, social dynamics > technology

My biggest takeaway from Clubhouse so far is that I’m much more impressed by the social dynamics the app enables than by the technology of the app itself.

I’m not impressed per se by Clubhouse’s tech. The app remains super bare-bones, with no ability, for example, to filter chat rooms by specific speakers or discussion topics.

Instead, to me, Clubhouse’s main product is the communication and access it provides to interesting human beings — such that the tech disappears into the background.

To be clear, this is a good thing. Would you want to be fumbling around with Spotify’s interface while trying to find the perfect music or podcast to listen to? No. Particularly in the context of social listening, the aim is to get to as close to zero friction as possible. And considering that many of Clubhouse’s power users are using the app as much as 20 to 40 hours per week, it’s best for the tech to stay out of their way to maximize their usage.

Based on reviews, Clubhouse’s biggest draws seem to be its spontaneity, authenticity and synchronicity. CNBC described the experience as “a mashup of listening to a podcast while scrolling through your Twitter feed and attending a conference remotely.” Susa Ventures co-founder and general partner Leo Polovets told the New York Times that “it’s almost like a podcast with audience participation.” Nathan Baschez, who writes the Divinations newsletter on business strategy, emphasized the importance of horizontal, lean-in group interaction as opposed to a one-directional, webinar-style experience. “Listening to a conversation from a handful of people is so much more compelling than watching a video from one or maybe two people,” wrote Baschez. “It’s also the key to the ‘party’ dynamic — meeting people.”

Rooms within Clubhouse span a wide range of social formats and expectations. You can have a catch-up conversation among a handful of old friends, a more chaotic meetup with brand-new acquaintances or a more structured, panel-like discussion among major celebrities for a passive audience of 40 to 50 people. Passive lurkers in these conversations can also jump from one room to the next without disturbing the flow of the app as a whole for others. In the process, they can rub shoulders with people from all walks of life. (In this sense, apps like Clubhouse could be especially effective for virtual conferences.)

Tech helps to facilitate these interactions, of course. But it ultimately takes a backseat, and is insufficient on its own for making people return to the app day after day.

Lessons for the music industry

Whether or not Clubhouse is around in six months, there are two major lessons that I think the app can teach the music industry right now.

One, linear, radio-like experiences are more relevant now than ever.

During Spotify’s Q1 2020 earnings call, CEO Daniel Ek underscored the streaming service’s positioning as a direct competitor to terrestrial radio, claiming that “the 20-year trend is that anything linear dies and on-demand wins.”

I respectfully disagree with Ek’s statement. If Clubhouse’s popularity and highly engaged user base — and the livestreaming surge in general — are any indication, people sheltered in place crave real-time, low-stakes engagement and shared presence with each other, and especially with interesting and influential people, much more than flat, on-demand streaming playlists.

These real-time experiences might not be taking the form of terrestrial radio in this moment, but live social video and audio give people a similar, highly linear format for building connection and talking through issues and events that are unfolding in real time.

Some people in the tech world are skeptical about Clubhouse’s future, given its insular foundation. As Michelle Tandler told WIRED, “there’s never been a social app that’s started with the venture community and took off.”

But there are many social apps that started and expanded from within specific cultural communities. And if the experience of listening to a Clubhouse room resembles radio or podcasts, as several reviewers have suggested, it makes sense to bring in more of the cultural influencers and public figures who are already familiar with those linear, conversational formats. (The successful Verzuz battles, which are fundamentally just free-flowing conversations among musical peers, come to mind.)

Two, livestreaming platforms at their best are two-way communication channels first and foremost, not one-way performance channels.

On a fundamental level, people want spontaneous access to other human beings, not merely to a scripted, detached series of events. In that vein, musical livestreaming experiences must take into account not just the content being streamed or “performed,” but the social interactions it enables.

For any social live/synchronous media experience, it helps to ask oneself: What are you trying to communicate, and what does your audience want to hear from you? Instead of merely performing for your audience, how can you include them in your communication — something that you can do online in a much more dynamic way than in an in-person show? And how can you design around the organic social mechanics that a given livestreaming platform provides, such that the tech actually takes a backseat in service of new human connections being made?

Why so many people inside and outside of the music industry are flocking to Clubhouse and other social audio platforms is that, unlike with a video livestream, you don’t need anything to show. You simply need something to say, and the curiosity to listen.