What’s next for social sound?

The hype around the Clubhouse seems to have died down and there are countless Similar initiatives developed by major tech parties. With varying degrees of success so far. What then?

Last year’s closure gave the Clubhouse a big boost in the Netherlands. It makes sense, because people naturally have a need to communicate and have conversations with like-minded people. The platform responded to that perfectly. From Asking Questions to Diederik Gommers and Sigrid Kaag to Football Analytics by Patrick Kluivert. In a short time, Clubhouse had many creators and 1 million downloads in our country. This growth has stagnated. Some pioneers have even stopped doing it. Service-oriented (small) entrepreneurs are still active on the platform. Experts and professionals take clients out of it, because they can share their expertise easily and in a low way on the platform.

Netflix . generation
Now that the world has opened up again, we will also return to old habits. Another factor is that other big tech companies are taking over the soundroom phenomenon, such as Spotify, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. With an audio community trend to stay. However, it is still too early to draw conclusions about who will be the most likely candidate.
An important distinguishing feature of Clubhouse is that you cannot record conversations. The advantage of this is that the conversations are real, less thoughtful, and more honest. The downside is that when the conversation ends, that content can’t be found anywhere, which means that value is lost and creators go back to content and community platforms where they can. Which is better for your insight, expert status and findability via search engines. But recipients also want to consume content at their convenience. Netflix generation. A Facebook group, a Linkedin group, or a Slack group are already competitors.

shocked
What’s different is that in the Clubhouse you usually don’t speak on behalf of a brand, but in your own personal capacity. As a brand, you are less likely to set up a community manager, which is easy to do on another platform. So the Clubhouse is best suited for personal communications, which you can then use professionally. It’s also not inconceivable that as the platform matures, major brands will also use their Clubhouse marketing communications budget. In the US and UK, the app is still very popular. So it looks like the app is able to take a beating. Time will tell who will win in the end.

*This article originally appeared in the October issue of Emerce magazine (#185).