Caroline Spiegel drags her mouse and pulls the audio scrubber from left to right on the screen. The track, “Good Morning,” features 24 minutes of whispers, kisses, and moans. “This is called a snuggle fuck,” she explains. “It’s where people cuddle and fuck.”
The content on the site she’s clicking around on is tagged with terms like S4D (“sub for dom”), M4F (“male for female”), F4F (“female for female”), MFM (that’s a threesome), and DD-LG (“daddy’s little girl”). There’s not a video or GIF in sight.
Spiegel (yes, she’s the sister of Snap’s Evan Spiegel) is the cofounder of Quinn, a platform for erotic recordings she describes as “YouTube for audio porn.” It’s an apt description, though given Quinn’s audio-only remit, "Spotify for audio porn" might be more accurate.
“We get that comparison all the time,” Spiegel says. “But we’re obviously really different.”
It’s true, Quinn is different, despite its obvious similarities to both platforms. First, it’s just for porn and not for music. And it doesn’t traffic in video, only in audio and text. In the last six months, more than 400 people have uploaded recordings of intimate moments to Quinn’s beta site, creating an aural repository of sexual predilections that you can stream through headphones like your favorite album.
Quinn is officially relaunching today with a lusty new look—dark background, sexy avatar photos, and a logo made from a textmoji wink—but it still has the same goal, which is to be the biggest platform for erotic audio on the internet.
Quinn is part of an audio porn renaissance. The old format, popularized by red-light chat lines, has reemerged, riding the wave of the podcast boom. Today there are as many forms of audio erotica as the sexual preferences it represents. Some companies like the venture-backed Dipsea produce narrative audio stories that people can subscribe to for a monthly fee. Others like the less glossy Literotica get authors to read their erotic literature aloud. Quinn’s biggest competitor is Reddit, where a community of more than 300,000 people upvote erotic audio clips on r/GoneWildAudio.
The rise of audio erotica is partially cultural and partially personal, says Nicole Prause, a neuroscientist who studies sexual arousal, and who founded the independent research organization Liberos. For some people, listening to audio might feel like a more “acceptable” alternative to the act of watching porn. “You're less being told what to fantasize about and more able to fill your own mind with things you find acceptable to you,” Prause says. At the same time, audio porn enables an interesting form of arousal.
There are tiers of stimulation, Prause explains. Video tends to be more stimulating than audio; audio is more stimulating than pure imagination. But audio is also able to engage the imagination in a way that video typically can’t. Sexual arousal is both physiological and mental. Prouse likes to reference a study where researchers placed a vibrator on mens’ penises to see what, if anything, the sensation did for their erections. “Your brain has to interpret the stimulation as being sexual and something your sexual brain is attending to and processing,” she says.
That theory holds true for Spiegel. She started Quinn with her cofounder Jackie Hanley while she was studying computer science at Stanford University. During her junior year, she had to drop out of school because of an eating disorder, and while recovering Spiegel says she realized she was uncomfortable with many aspects of her sex life. Masturbating was difficult and not pleasurable. And so much of mainstream porn, with its hyper-objectification of women’s bodies, didn’t feel like the right fit. While searching for porn that she might actually like to watch, she came across a guided-audio masturbation track. “I felt so turned on in a way that I’d never felt by myself before,” Spiegel says. Audio, she learned, allowed her to embrace the cerebral aspect of sexuality. “It emphasizes the sort of nonobvious, intangible parts of sex—the desire, the buildup, and the intimacy that you get in real life.”
She figured that she couldn’t be the only one who felt this way, so Spiegel began a makeshift user research campaign where she’d interview people on campus about their porn preferences. At the same time, she and a small team were reaching out to people to see if they’d feel comfortable contributing to the platform. The site began to quickly fill with audio clips from people Spiegel and her team, sourced on places like on Reddit’s GoneWildAudio and Literotica. She even occasionally approaches strangers about contributing. “Sometimes I'll hear someone with a sexy voice and I'll stop them,” she adds.
Like YouTube, Quinn is is populated by user-generated content. Spiegel and her team never create audio clips themselves; they provide the infrastructure for people to upload their own sexual role-playing and fantasies. Quinn will be paying creators of “premium” content to bring their audio to the site—everyone else can can be “tipped” by listeners. The tipping functionality will show up on the site later this month and won’t have a default suggested amount, but Spiegel expects creators to set their range between $1 and $50. At launch, Quinn will host 500 pieces of audio porn that people can search for using tags, arrange into playlists, and stream. Spiegel figures that not long from now, that number is going to be much higher. And that’s where things get complicated.
Like with any platform, the quality of content can vary wildly, both creatively and technically. Some of the audio clips are made by amateur audio porn enthusiasts; others by people who record erotic audio for a living. Anyone and everyone can upload erotic audio so long as it doesn’t violate the community guidelines. “Our golden rules are no incest—we allow stepbrother, stepsister—no beastiality, no minors whatsoever, and no nonconsent,” she says. “But you can have consensual nonconsent, so like within the boundaries of fantasy or play.”
In its new iteration, Quinn is relying on the community to report inappropriate content and behavior. There’s a reporting feature built into the site, which for now is as much moderation as the platform will have. Spiegel says she doesn’t love the idea of relinquishing control of the content, but as the site grows it’s an inevitability. “The push and pull of being a platform is that we really want to create this vibrant community that blossoms on its own, but it means giving up a lot of control,” she adds.
In that way—and plenty of others—Quinn feels a lot like a social media platform, just one devoted to audio porn. The site will have messaging, likes, and comments. An “Explore” section will surface new and popular content, while most people will just look at their feed, where they can follow content from tags and creators they’ve liked. Compared with the video porn universe where it’s common practice to bombard people with overstimulating content the moment they load a website, Quinn does a good job of giving people a sense of autonomy over the content they see. “I think the feeling people naturally associate with sites like PornHub is being a little bit out of control,” she says. “This feeling of you go down a rabbit hole and you snap out of it a little while later.”
That rabbit-hole effect has produced results for sites like PornHub, where the 4.79 million videos uploaded last year attracted 33.5 billion visits in 2018—that’s a daily average of 92 million visitors. There’s little doubt that the appetite is there for video porn consumption and creation, but will audio porn be able to keep people’s attention in such a world? Spiegel is betting it can.
“I think everybody might benefit from engaging with content that embraces the complexities of human sexuality a little bit more,” she says. “Not because it’s necessarily healthier for you, but because it’s actually more pleasurable, more erotic, and more fun.”
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