Hi, I'm Danframack, and welcome to Axios Recap, brought to you by Morgan Stanley.

Today is Monday, February 8th. Tampa Bay is up, Kansas City is down, and we're focused on the next big

thing in social media.

Social media began with text. Facebook status updates, tweets, LinkedIn job postings.

It then extended to photos and videos via sites like Instagram and Snapchat.

But the next social medium might be the original one.

Voice.

Late last winter, just as the pandemic was really getting underway, a new mobile

app called Clubhouse appeared. At first, it was invite only, reserved for Silicon Valley elites,

and it was audio only. The way it works is that a user would create a room focused on a particular

topic and then invite a few other people to actively participate

in the conversation.

Everyone else in the room would listen, although they had the ability to, quote, raise

their hands, at which point the moderator could either invite them to participate or ignore

them.

And it's not just replicating tech conferences or giving fantasy football advice.

On Christmas, for example, a 40-person cast used Clubhouse

to debut a live version of the Lion King musical. Today, Clubhouse is still invite only,

but the audience has expanded significantly. It claimed two weeks ago to have two million

weekly active users, and that was before high-profile Clubhouse discussions involving

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Clubhouse also hit the real big tech validation of being

blocked in China and of being copied by legacy social media companies like Twitter. So we wanted

...