Facebook Announces Clubhouse Clone Live Audio Rooms, Set To Launch Mid-Year

Facebook announced a new feature called Live Audio Rooms that mimics much of what popular audio-based app Clubhouse does. It is expected to launch by summer – that’s mid-2021 for the rest of us who don’t live in the Northern Hemisphere.

Rumours have swirled around the development of Facebook’s Clubhouse clone. Facebook has already been beta testing Hotline, a Q&A-based app that’s quite similar to Clubhouse, but Live Audio Rooms seems to be a separate feature that’s fully integrated within the existing Facebook ecosystem.

Before launch, Facebook said it intends to test Live Audio Rooms in Groups, making it available globally for Group users and their communities. Public figures will also have access to the feature, allowing them to host conversations with other public figures, experts, and fans.

Live Audio Rooms will also be available on Messenger at launch – which comports with rumours last month that the social media giant was working to build a broadcasting feature into Messenger. Unlike Clubhouse though, content creators have the options of turning a live conversation into a podcast for later listening, and sharing audio excerpts from a session in the form of Soundbites (also a new feature). In contrast, Clubhouse’s philosophy emphasises privacy and the app generally doesn’t allow recordings – an attribute that made it initially popular in China before it was banned there.

Facebook is taking a different route probably based on commercial considerations – it wants to make things easier for creators, attracting a large pool of them. While unveiling Live Audio Rooms, the social media giant also pointed to creator monetisation opportunities through its Star feature, and announced an upcoming ability to charge access to a Live Audio Room through a single purchase or a subscription.

Earlier this month, Clubhouse itself announced its first monetisation feature called “Payments”, which enables direct payments to creators.

Facebook May Introduce Clubhouse-Like Broadcasting Feature To Messenger Rooms

It was rumoured back in February that Facebook is developing its own clone of Clubhouse, which would introduce a similar broadcasting service to its ecosystem. Thanks to a recent discovery by reverse engineer Alessandro Paluzzi, more details regarding the new feature have been revealed.

According to Paluzzi, the experimental version of the upcoming service was found as part of Facebook’s app code on Android, and is indicated to be a new addition to the social network’s Messenger Rooms feature. Rooms itself is considered to be the company’s answer to Zoom, enabling Facebook users to host and participate in virtual meetings or discussions – therefore, combining these elements together makes sense and eliminates the need to introduce a separate app just for broadcasting.

It is revealed that users are able to host different types of Rooms with this new feature; including Live Audio for broadcasting to listeners, and friends-only audio or video private sessions. In its current iteration, Messenger Rooms only allows for up to 50 people to participate in both audio and video sessions. The new Live Audio feature, on the other hand, will likely remove that limitation due to its broadcasting approach.

When approached by TechCrunch, Facebook confirmed that these new Messenger Rooms features are indeed part of its “exploratory audio efforts”. However, the social media giant did not provide an answer when asked regarding the expected rollout for these new additions. We just hope that the finalised version would not only feature Rooms occupied by nothing but Mark Zuckerberg clones as per the screenshots above.

As previously reported, Facebook isn’t the only one attempting to capitalise on the whole audio-only broadcasting fad. Also onboard are rival social media companies Twitter and TikTok owner ByteDance. The former had recently launched its own Clubhouse clone known as Twitter Spaces, while the latter is reportedly developing its own broadcasting platform.