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Inside audioBoom: the British internet radio company doing something different

Barry Collins Read more December 21, 2015

In the space of two years, almost everything has changed at internet radio company audioBoom: its CEO; its entire business model; the technology that powers the service; even its name. This turnaround has seen the service grow from around 25,000 registered users to more than five million, and last year the company was listed on the London Stock Exchange for the first time.

Inside audioBoom: the British internet radio company doing something different

This success hasn’t come without pain, however, not least the alienation of the man – and many of the loyal users, including celebrities such as Red Dwarf actor Robert Llewellyn – who helped build the company in the first place.

So, how did this British company reinvent itself to become a rival to giants such as SoundCloud? And what technology is it using to ensure this growth continues?

From Audioboo to audioBoom

audioBoom started life in 2009 as Audioboo, under the evangelistic leadership of founder and CEO Mark Rock. Rock wanted to create a service that democratised radio, that allowed anyone with a smartphone to record a short audio clip and share it with a community of like-minded listeners, whether they were reporting from a war zone in Libya or sitting in their living room with a cup of tea.

audioboom_homepage

The service was an instant hit. Media outlets including Channel 4 News, The Guardian and even PC Pro used it to bring live audio reports to new audiences. Celebrities such as Chris Moyles and the ubiquitous Stephen Fry jumped aboard. Little more than a year after Audioboo launched, Rock was listed at number 14 in The Guardian’s list of the 100 most influential people in the media, ranking above Rebekah Brooks, Steve Ballmer and The Guardian’s own editor, Alan Rusbridger.

“The single most important new media tool of the past two years.”

The Guardian’s panel of judges described Audioboo as “the single most important new media tool of the past two years”. Having already “changed the way we use audio, now it is going to reinvent the way we think about digital radio”, the panel concluded. There was just one problem: nobody had figured out how it was going to make money.

By mid-2012, the company’s investors had grown tired of the red ink. The service had a core userbase of only 25,000 users and, premium accounts aside, had no obvious way of earning revenue from them. The business model had failed, and a new chief executive, Robert Proctor, was brought in to rescue the company. Rock was sidelined into the role of president before, somewhat acrimoniously, quitting the company early in 2013.

“The issue was probably quite fundamental,” Proctor says when asked to explain what was wrong with Audioboo when he joined. “Most people just don’t like the sound of their own voice. Twenty-five thousand regular monthly users after three-and-a-half years probably proved there isn’t much of a model in that business.”

audioBoom’s old website before its snazzy redesign

Instead, Proctor decided to refocus the business on providing a personalised feed of audio from professional broadcasters, such as the BBC, Sky Sports News Radio and talkSPORT. Instead of relying on one man and his phone, Audioboo would deliver audio from the big brands to a larger and (potentially) more lucrative audience.

However, to do that, the company needed to change its name. “The basic principle behind the ‘boo’ becoming ‘boom’ is that we have a lot more sports and entertainment packages now, and none of them like to be ‘booed’,” says Proctor. “We needed a new name that was more positive.”

Reshaping the audioBoom app

The switch from Audioboo to audioBoom was more than cosmetic. The company relaunched its app in September and brought with it a fundamental set of new technologies that attempt to improve the listening experience. While the functions to record and share your own audio haven’t been removed entirely, they’ve been stripped back, and the focus has switched to a continuous stream of audio clips from broadcasters, based on the listener’s predefined interests.

“The focus has switched to a continuous stream of audio clips from broadcasters.”

When you first fire up the app, you’re asked to choose from a menu of topics you might be interested in – sport, entertainment, comedy, music – each of which drills down into a series of subcategories, such as football, rugby and cycling. However, audioBoom doesn’t rely purely on stated preferences: it has devised an algorithm that tailors the content of the feed to the user’s listening habits.

“There’s a mix of local intelligence in the app and on the servers,” says chief technology officer Jonathan del Strother. “The app considers the categories that you’ve been listening to, how long you spend listening to them, what you tend to skip past and so on. Our servers use similar inputs, but spread across all our users’ listening habits, to introduce you to new groups of content.”

Read on to find out how audioBoom is planning for success

This piece of technology is so crucial to audioBoom’s success that it hired a dedicated artificial intelligence company in Mountain View, California to develop the algorithm alongside del Strother and his team in the UK.

Another key addition to the app is the Daily Download, a two-hour slice of personalised audio that’s downloaded automatically to the user’s device every night, ensuring that they have something to listen to on the way to work in the morning without having to rely on a flaky data connection as they drive to the office or catch the train.

“The majority of all audio listening is done in some form of transport,” says Proctor. “The other thing that’s fundamental to it – one that maybe a lot of other listening experiences miss – is that audio is pretty much always a secondary activity. Anything that breaks your attention away from the primary activity and forces you to pick up the phone and search for content every five minutes is totally counter-intuitive.”

audioBoom’s back-end technology

“The company sells advertising when its player is embedded into websites, splitting the revenue with the broadcaster.”

It isn’t only the front-end technology that audioBoom has revamped, but also the back-end. The company has to make it effortless for content partners to upload their clips to audioBoom’s servers, and it offers them a variety of ways to do this. Some use a dedicated API; others with reporters in the field upload directly from the web interface or the smartphone app. “We can also import in bulk using RSS,” explains del Strother. “We have a cluster of workers polling the broadcasters’ feeds, scanning for audio content, which is automatically imported.”

And how, app listeners may wonder, does either party make money, given that there are currently no adverts in the app? Proctor says embedding ads into app listeners’ audio streams “is just not a good user experience”. Instead, the company sells advertising when audioBoom’s player is embedded into websites, splitting the revenue with the broadcaster that provides the content.

“If we get content in from Sky that’s about, say, Tottenham Hotspur, we have 200 or 300 websites within our network that would love to have it,” explains Proctor. “Our media player then appears in that website and we can run pre- and post-roll advertising in that.”

How audioBoom is breaking away from the past

Proctor now calls the company a “SaaS [software as a service] platform for tier-one broadcasters”, which is undoubtedly a long way from Rock’s original vision of a voice for the masses. The switch in emphasis has clearly antagonised many loyal Audioboo users. The once-prolific Robert Llewellyn hasn’t posted a “boo” in more than a year, and many others have blogged or broadcast their distaste for the new approach. “Is it only about the money?” blogged journalist and regular Audioboo user Christian Payne. “Do we invest our time, words, ideas and feelings wrapped in stories just to make the other investors rich?”

Proctor says he hopes the service can retain many of its early adopters, but he admits it will be difficult. Yet, while the new business direction may have stretched the patience of a once-loyal user community, it seems likely that the business itself would have been stretched had it continued to follow its original path.

The lesson for budding British developers is writ large: a brilliant app may get you plenty of media attention but, without a business model to back it up, it won’t pay the bills.