Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Monday that Facebook is launching a suite of new tools and features designed to help users better connect with each other and their favorite creators through sound.
Why does it matter: The digital audio craze exploded during the pandemic, causing several of the biggest tech and social media giants to double the new audio features.
Details: Speaking to a community on the Discord Monday chat app hosted by freelance journalist Casey Newton, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg provided a product roadmap for how he plans to build his audio suite in the next 3-6 months. (Vox first reported the plan on Sunday.)
- Sound fragments: Facebook’s new short-lived audio product will serve users the flow of short videos. Zuckerberg says this product is like an audio version of his TikTok video product, like Reels. Users can share individual clips in their news feeds or consume a series of audio clips joined and distributed algorithmically in a stream.
- Podcasts: Zuckerberg says Facebook will build a podcast discovery tool for creators to share their podcasts with Facebook users and also for users to consume and discover podcasts on Facebook. He alluded to Facebook’s potential partnership with an external podcast app and guiding users to that app to listen to podcasts in the background of their Facebook experience.
- Live audio: “From time to time, a new environment emerges that can be adopted in many different areas,” Zuck said, using the News Feed as an example. Zuckerberg suggested that there will be ways in which live sound can help Facebook boost the creators’ economy.
The whole picture: Zuckerberg has experimented more with audio platforms lately as the trend gets bigger. A few weeks ago, he unveiled a new shopping partnership with Shopify on Clubhouse, a new audio startup that recently raised a new round of fundraising to $ 4 billion.
- “From a production experience it’s also much more affordable,” Zuckerberg said, discussing audio as a medium.
- Zuckerberg said Facebook’s goal is to build a suite of audio products that will eventually be as powerful as its text, photo and video products. “At a high-level image here, we believe the sound will also be a first-class environment,” he said.
What are they saying: Zuckerberg said that many of these audio efforts are aimed at helping creators make better use of their work.
- “We really focus more on the creative side than on the consumption side,” he said.
- Zuckerberg noted that Facebook’s new “Facebook” tipping platform “went pretty well, better than expected.”
- He said the company is also building infrastructure for things like donations or subscriptions that can help creators monetize their products that could one day be applied audio.
Yes but: The audio boom comes with some content moderation risks.
- For example, Clubhouse close rooms discussing the “Jewish White Privilege” Sunday after anti-Semitic commentary reports appeared on Twitter.
- Zuckerberg says Facebook’s current moderation infrastructure, which includes thousands of content moderators, can be used in this new area.
Go deeper: Dollars get into live audio as moderation issues arise
Editor’s note: This story has been updated with more details from Zuckerberg’s interview, as well as to note Vox’s Sunday story on the audio plane.