Spotify Launches Greenroom Live Audio App, A Clubhouse Rival

Spotify just announced a live audio app dubbed Greenroom. This is an effective answer to the well-known platform Clubhouse from the Swedish online music streaming giant. Greenroom lets users to either host their own discussions or join live discussions created by others.

Greenroom, A Clubhouse Rival

The launch of the Greenroom live audio app comes after the acquisition of Betty Labs by Spotify. The company that it acquired is best known for the popular sports-focused audio platform called Locker Room.

This move comes at a right time when the social audio segment has grown significantly. Apart from podcasts, the social audio segment has taken off over the past year with the launch of Clubhouse from the San Francisco-based company leading the way in this industry. Notably, since December last year, Clubhouse has witnessed over 18 million downloads, claims the data from AppMagic.

Besides Spotify, other tech giants including Twitter and Facebook have also jumped onto the bandwagon of live audio sector. To be specific, Twitter launched Spaces late last year and Facebook started hosting Live Audio Rooms. However, the ability of these platforms to monetise their content still remains unanswered.

Moreover, all these platforms that are coming up of late have to compete against the likes of Discord, which has been in the market since 2015. Already, Discord has over 140 million users and it is focused on video game players predominantly.

Spotify Has An Edge Over Others

Having a strong presence in the audio market, Spotify has many advantages as compared to the others and it focuses on music and podcasts. Last month, the streaming service rolled out three new features - buttons with increased readability features, a beta for podcast transcripts, and options for text resizing.

The new features of Spotify will be rolled out as a part of the update that will reach the Android and iOS iterations of the app in the coming weeks. The transcripts feature will be available for the Spotify Original podcasts and is planned to include all podcasts in the future. Already, during the Google I/O keynote. Spotify announced that it will let users download playlists and podcasts on Wear OS devices.