Facebook Makes Its Foray Into Different Types of Audio

The social media company unveiled new audio projects, partnerships and creator tools on Monday, signaling that it wants to be a serious player in social audio and podcasting. 

In an interview with journalist Casey Newton on the Sidechannel Discord server, Zuckerberg laid out a five-pronged salvo into the audio space that includes new audio creation tools, an infinite scroll feature of audio clips called Soundbites, on-platform podcasts, live audio rooms like on Clubhouse and a music partnership with Spotify currently called Project Boombox.

It’s too soon to call this a “pivot to audio” a la Facebook’s now-infamous algorithm change that took publishers along a disaster course of prioritized short-form video a few years back.