Spotify Planning on Bringing Its Own Clubhouse Competitor

BY Sanuj Bhatia

Published 30 Mar 2021

Clubhouse has been gaining popularity since its release. Spotify, today, as a part of its recent acquisition of Betty Labs, announced its plan of bringing a Clubhouse-like live audio feature to its app.

Betty Labs, the creator of the popular live-audio app Locker Room, was acquired by Spotify today. Even though the details of the transaction weren’t revealed, Spotify did lay out its plans of diversifying the live sports audio app into much more.

“Creators and fans have been asking for live formats on Spotify, and we’re excited that soon, we’ll make them available to hundreds of millions of listeners and millions of creators on our platform. The world already turns to us for music, podcasts, and other unique audio experiences, and this new live audio experience is a powerful complement that will enhance and extend the on-demand experience we provide today.”

As a result of the acquisition, the Locker Room app will stay on the App Store. Spotify will expand Locker Room’s topics from only sports to music, culture, and more in the future. The app will also be rebranded in the upcoming updates, though no name has been revealed as of now.

Even though Spotify says the two apps will remain separate, for now at least, its chief R&D officer Söderström says “maybe we’ll integrate some of these features or all of these features in the future.” He also says that Spotify will ‘experiment with different monetization features.’ Some live-audio chats might be free to enter, while some might be paid, he added.

Recently, Telegram introduced its new Clubhouse-like unlimited voice chats feature. Twitter is also known to be working on a Clubhouse competitor called Spaces, which will be rolled out to users next month.

We Want to Hear From You

How often do you use Clubhouse? What features do you expect from Spotify’s live-audio app? Let us know in the comments section below!

[Via Spotify]