Company will end service after it fails to achieve expected results. Find out more now!
Amazon has decided to shut down the live music app Amp, one of Clubhouse's competitors. The app is closing down about a year and a half after its launch, as it failed to achieve the growth the company had hoped for. The service arrived with the promise of reinventing radio, allowing users to play live music and interact with other users.
Amp allowed people to create playlists, chat between tracks, and invite others to join. It launched in May 2022, but has stagnated and failed to see the expected growth. As of July of this year, more than a year after its launch, Amp had just under 700,000 monthly active users, according to sources at TechCrunch.
Continue reading to learn more about this music app and its closure.
Service termination
The leader of the digital music division from Amazon, Stee Boom, sent an internal message confirming the decision to discontinue the platform after “months of consideration,” according to Bloomberg. According to the report, the decision was not made quickly or easily. Boom added that it only became clear after months of careful consideration determining the investments Amazon wants for the future.
Some features of the app may still appear on Amazon Music. The company will attempt to integrate live music interaction into the service, according to the publication. It did not provide a date for when the service will stop working.
The decision comes as no surprise, considering the company cut Amp’s headcount in half in 2022. At the time of its launch, Amazon tried to capitalize on the success of live audio streaming during the pandemic by offering rewards to creators. However, the popularity eventually faded.
Since its launch, the app has been downloaded 1.3 million times, according to a survey by analytics firm data.ai. Even Clubhouse, which set the trend with real-time audio chats, is struggling to maintain engagement with new features on the platform.
Clubhouse
As a novelty, the Clubhouse invested in an update that will make it more private. The app became known for being a kind of open podcast, with celebrities and chat rooms on different topics. To join, the user needs an invitation, making the experience exclusive. The new feature, called Chats, allows people on the social network to talk to each other through audio messages in private rooms.
Chats are simple and, instead of the conversation taking place in a large room where everyone interacts with each other, the feature allows friends and acquaintances to chat only with each other. The idea is that the user records a message and sends it, being able to listen to the messages received by friends through Chats, but without the need to gather everyone in a room. According to Clubhouse itself, the feature is similar to Stories. from Instagram, functioning as a “virtual bar table”.
With Chats, nothing changes and users still need an invitation to participate. However, now the idea is to connect people who already know each other. Despite the novelty, traditional rooms are still the main attraction of the network, which once had its “boom”, but also lost popularity.
