Live Audio Apps Lure Creators With Money and Promises

When Twitter launched Spaces, its live audio feature, Reesha Howard couldn’t wait to start broadcasting. She already had a YouTube channel, so she was used to sharing her personality online, but Spaces offered up a new way to flex her voice. She DM’d the rapper Soulja Boy; did he want to do an interview in her Space? Shockingly, he said yes. Then she hosted a game show for The Game. She spoke to Charlese Antoinette, the costume designer for Judas and the Black Messiah, just days before Antoinette won an Oscar. “I consider myself to be the official queen of Twitter Spaces,” says Howard. Not bad for someone who had only 87 Twitter followers a few months ago. Now, thanks to her listeners, she has about 4,000.Decades ago, if you heard someone’s voice live on the internet, it often meant an online radio broadcast. Then podcasting came on the scene, and everyone with a mic and a laptop could upload their conversations to the web. Now the rise of live audio apps, led by Clubhouse’s breakout success last summer, is reshaping the landscape once again, the same way social media disrupted the blogosphere years ago: Anyone with a smartphone has…
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