Sources: Amazon is developing a live audio feature, led by its Music division, with a focus on live music and potentially radio and podcasts
Amazon is investing heavily in a new live audio feature that's similar to other live audio offerings like Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces and Spotify's new live audio platform, sources tell Axios. Tweets: @sarafischer Tweets: Sara Fischer / @sarafischer : The effort, which is being led by Amazon's Music division, includes paying podcast networks, musicians and celebrities to use the feature for live conversations, shows and events. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This Axios report was the first look at what became a two-year arc inside Amazon: sources said Amazon's Music division, which had already partnered with Twitch for artist livestreams, was building a live audio feature with paid talent — podcast networks, musicians and celebrities — to take on [[e:Clubhouse|Clubhouse]], Twitter Spaces and Spotify. Weeks later an internal presentation surfaced detailing "Project Mic," a radio-show hosting app aimed at the US first.
That pipeline ran from the Project Mic presentation to the March 2022 launch of Amp, which let users DJ licensed tracks while taking call-ins — before Amazon pulled the plug in late 2023. The through-line is that Amazon entered the live-audio race with money (talent payments) and music licensing as its differentiators, and exited when neither overcame the format's audience problem.
First-order effects
- Amazon Music's planned payments to podcast networks, musicians and celebrities put it in direct bidding competition with Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces, Facebook's Live Audio Rooms and Spotify's live platform for the same small pool of live-audio talent.
- The Music division's leadership means any launch would be built on Amazon Music's catalog rights — a lever rivals without major-label licenses couldn't copy.
Second-order effects
- Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces face a deep-pocketed entrant willing to pay for exclusivity, pressuring them to fund creators they had largely attracted organically.
- If hosts could play licensed Amazon Music tracks live, radio-style programming migrates toward whoever holds both the catalog and the payout budget, squeezing independent live-audio apps on content cost.
Third-order effects
- Amazon's eventual shutdown of Amp suggests the structural lesson of the 2020-21 live-audio boom: paid talent and licensed catalogs don't sustain a format whose engagement collapsed once pandemic-era novelty faded — big platforms now treat social audio as a feature, not a product.
- For music streamers, the failed experiment points toward folding interactive audio back into existing subscriptions rather than funding standalone live apps.
The trend: Social live audio is consolidating from venture-funded standalone apps into features inside incumbent platforms, with Amazon's build-and-shut cycle marking the end of the standalone era.