Clubhouse is breaking up to stay relevant

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

It has been a while since I spoke to you. For the next week-plus, I get to do my best impression of your host, since he is on vacation. I talk about the new look of Clubhouse, the addition of a branded sound, and a new partnership.

There is a split up of the club.

I wanted to see if there were any rooms worth tuning into. The room called "Tech News around the World" was suggested by the app. Things broke down immediately after that. There was a quick tip for getting more saves on your pins. Only 17 people listened to it. A person who doesn't know Raymo was poorly targeted when I popped in to wish him a happy birthday.

It almost goes without saying that there has been a big drop-off in interest since its height. Downloads of the app have plummeted this year according to Sensor Tower. In the first half of the 21st century, the firm says Clubhouse was downloaded 29.4 million times. At the same time, there is anecdotally at least one restaurant that has been eating lunch from the micro-blogging site. The company was able to quickly rebuild the core features of the app within its existing social network, sucking off a lot of the app's momentum.

It was obvious for a while that the company needed to make some changes to regain the early buzz. The next era of Clubhouse will look something like this: instead of one open network containing a countless series of rooms you can pop into, the app will ask people to organize into groups, and audio rooms will exist inside those groups that are only accessible Each house can have its own moderation rules.

The goal is to make it easier to find things of interest in the public rooms. There isn't a single community that works beyond a certain size.

This is an idea we have seen many times. You can create a niche for just about anyone if you add too many friends to Facebook. It's hard to pull off this kind of approach, but it can be meaningful when it works.

Live audio rooms are a format that people want to use for entertainment. Is the problem that the club got too large? Is the problem that we can't see our friends again because we have other things to do? Live audio is easy to spin up, so I think it is still around. I am not confident that it will be at the scale of an entire app.

Anyone interested in testing the changes can sign up. The form states that new houses will be approved slowly. It won't launch for everyone at the same time.

PRX productions partners with goat rodeo to make more shows.

PRX is teaming up with another company to expand what can be done on its own. As it seeks new shows to develop, the division has enlisted Goat Rodeo as a trusted production partner.

PRX is a production company that works with brands to develop podcasts. CBS News has been included so far. At the end of the year, it had worked with more than 20 partners and produced over 600 episodes of the show. The Met, Lawfare, and iHeartMedia have partnerships with Goat Rodeo.

PRX productions has never formed a partnership like this before. In the future, producers will work on projects best suited with their expertise and experience, according to David Cotrone, PRX spokesman.

The two groups are not part of one another. The partnership will allow the two production groups to support one another as independent audio organizations and PRX will distribute some original shows for Goat Rodeo.

The new logo of Panera is loud.

I missed this one a couple of weeks ago, but it just got recirculated by Inside Radio. There is a level where this sounds a little over the top to me. We are aware of what's being advertised. This type of advertising works. If I didn't pay attention to the rest of the ad, I wouldn't know what the Mcdonald's jingle sounded like.

There is a sound. It sounded like a burst of horns followed by an angel. It's a little crazy when you describe it. It's a little annoying but it's likely to get stuck in your head and make you happy. The marketing brew is here.

​​The resulting three-second sonic logo is half instrumental—played by a trumpet, an alto sax, and a baritone sax, according to [Made Music Studio president Lauren] McGuire—and half vocals. There’s also a one-second version, a six-second version, and a long-form version that clocks in at just under a minute, which Panera might use for situations like “walk-up music [for] our CEO,” [Panera VP of brand building Drayton] Martin said.

You can hear it at the end of the video. You might have heard it by now, because the clip has been live for a while. It's time to eat a Mediterranean vegetable.

Today, that is all. You will see me on Thursday. Next week everyone else will catch you.

The audio industry is growing every Tuesday.