Facebook’s Clubhouse clone confirmed for mid-year launch

It’s no secret that Facebook has been hard at work cloning Clubhouse, the latest social media platform to take off thanks to its snazzy audio room premise. In the second quarter of 2021 Live Audio Rooms will be added to Facebook. And if you’re wondering what exactly this feature entails, just take a crash course in Clubhouse because they’re practically the same thing.

The social network’s rollout is happening incrementally and will first hit Facebook Groups before expanding to public figures and then eventually Messengers so you and your friends can have conversations while that one person you don’t really like is forced to sit and watch.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Clubhouse clone if people couldn’t potentially make cash off the platform. The feature for users to record their sessions and eventually charge for entry to the audio rooms will be patched into the app soon after launch. Folks will be able to subscribe to certain audio-rooms or just pay for a once-off entry.

Hey, listen Facebook!

Of course, because this is Facebook, it’s also incentivising folks to drop Clubhouse and come to the dark side through an Audio Creator Fund to push users to adopt the feature. Then there’s Soundbites, which basically sounds like a TikTok for Facebook curated audio notes. It sounds dumb, we know, but we can also imagine it being very successful.

Speaking to The Verge, Mark Zuckerberg said “The high-level picture here is that we think that audio is, of course, also going to be a first-class medium, and that there are all these different products to build across this whole spectrum.”

It’s not just an audio rooms feature Facebook is embracing, it’s making moves in the podcast game too. There’s a partnership with Spotify in the mix that will implement the audio streaming app into user’s News Feeds so you’ll be able to listen to podcasts directly through Facebook. All you’ll need to do is link your accounts and you’ll unite your social media and podcasting hobbies. Why you’d want to do this is beyond us, but maybe we’re just old.

“Our ambition has always been to make Spotify ubiquitous across platforms and devices — bringing music and podcasts to more people — and our new integration with Facebook is another step in these efforts,” a Spotify spokesperson said in a statement to The Verge. “We look forward to a continued partnership with Facebook, fuelling audio discovery around the world.”