Spotify stated on Tuesday it has bought Betty Labs, the corporate behind sports-focused social audio app Locker Room, to speed up its transfer into stay audio. New voice-based platforms, together with invite-only social app Clubhouse, have seen fast development in current months in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Locker Room, launched in October 2020, turned a preferred spot for sports activities followers to speak and maintain watch events.
The music-streaming service stated within the coming months it might “evolve and expand” Locker Room to supply sports activities, music, and cultural programming in addition to stay discussions with skilled athletes, musicians and different personalities. “Creators and fans have been asking for live formats on Spotify, and we’re excited that soon, we’ll make them available to hundreds of millions of listeners and millions of creators on our platform,” stated Gustav Soderstrom, Chief Research & Development Officer at Spotify.
Spotify didn’t disclose the price of the acquisition. Betty Labs was initially backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners and later by GV, Alphabet Inc’s enterprise capital arm, and Precursor Ventures. Last October, Betty Labs raised $9.3 million in seed funding led by GV. “We are excited to join forces with Spotify and continue building the future of audio – we’ll invest more in our product, open the experience to Spotify’s audience, diversify our content offerings, and continue expanding the community we’ve built,” stated Betty Labs founder and CEO Howard Akumiah.
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Spotify has additionally been making a push into podcasting, and has spent a whole lot of thousands and thousands of {dollars} to spice up its podcast vary and debuted a podcast promoting market. Screenshots shared by a Twitter person final week confirmed Spotify was surveying some customers about how typically they used Clubhouse. Twitter can also be testing a stay audio app Spaces, which it plans to publicly launch by April, and Facebook is reportedly dabbling with its personal stay audio providing.
