It was 2021 when Spotify decided to officially launch Live, a standalone voice chat app, in the wake of the huge success of Clubhouse in the pandemic. After two years of activity, without particular successes, the company today announced the definitive closure of the service.
“After a period of experimentation, which we used to learn how Spotify users interact with live audio, we have made the decision to shut down Spotify Live,” a company spokesperson told the Music Ally website.
Spotify Live will no longer be available
Actually the app was originally called Locker Room, before being acquired by Spotify in 2021 (for around $62 million) and temporarily renamed Spotify Greenroom. In the beginning Locker Room, as the name suggests, had sport as its main focus: fans of various disciplines used the app to discuss the performance of their favorite teams in different sports.
By transforming it into Greenroom, Spotify has tried to broaden the topics of discussion, making the service more akin to its generalist target. After all, 2021 was a golden age for voice chat apps, after the Clubhouse exploit. That same year Meta launched Soundbites and Twitter, well before the follies of Elon Musk, tested what are now known as Spaces: vocal discussion rooms.
Meanwhile Meta has suspended Soundbites, and Reddit has put an end to its program called Talk. Today, with the announcement of the closure of Live, Spotify also definitively says goodbye to that feature that was perceived as revolutionary only two years ago.