The draw of audio apps over other traditional formats is obvious to any podcast (and music) devotee: the ease.

In contrast, audio startups face a less crowded and less competitive landscape.

Listening to someone’s voice is personal, and hearing unedited audio is the opposite of seeing the highlights. It’s about ideas, not the visuals, so it emphasizes a different kind of content that can often feel deeper and more intellectually stimulating.

In recent years, listening to podcasts has become more mainstream; today, more than half the US population has listened to roughly a million shows.

That emotion that audio can stoke—the swell of a concert, a baby’s laugh, the roar of a stadium crowd—is inherently social.

though audio apps may have begun with podcasting and audio books, I’m convinced we’re on the front-end of a decade of innovation in social audio experiences.

Clubhouse provides yet another example. The experience is somewhere between a conference call, a podcast, and a live talk show. Although the content is ephemeral, like a phone call, it’s also a horizontal and public platform, which is more like live podcasting.

If you were to mix and match each of the attributes above, there are many thousands of possible configurations that might lead to new, cohesive products. 

I believe three themes will emerge: innovation in the content format, the evolution of the business model, and the growing ubiquity of audio.

A future product might be long-form, with a twist—maybe it focuses on high-quality educational content or short stories from prominent authors.

This shift exposed a simple fact: in an ad-driven world, creators were generally under-monetizing their audiences. Fans of creators were willing to pay more—a lot more.

In the near future, we will likely transcend sponsored promos to truly native social audio monetization, unlocking the next generation of social companies.

These inventions created new product categories and consumer demands—to be faster, to allow for voice, to be portable—leading to the telephone, the steam-powered printing press, typewriters, in turn causing the next waves of innovation. In the modern era, history repeats itself.

The next decade of innovation of audio will likely be as productive and valuable that of messaging, video, and other media to date.