In 2015 two students in Taiwan, Howard Yang and Andy Huang, wrote the voice-centric social networking app “Goodnight,” aimed at helping people find new friends. Through word of mouth alone, in just nine months they got some 300,000 downloads.

In 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic raged across the world, closing down cities and alienating people from one another as they moved toward working from home, more and more people turned to technology for comfort, from the voice-only social networking tools Clubhouse and Goodnight to audio programming in the form of podcasts.

Goodnight, which has successfully expanded into overseas markets including Japan, South Korea and Thailand, has now accumulated a hopping 11 million downloads. In Taiwan alone, during the Covid outbreak in 2021, user activity blew up: “Even people who don’t usually use this kind of social software began giving it a try,” observes Andy Huang.

Taiwan’s largest podcast platform, SoundOn, has data that supports Huang’s observation. Founded in 2019, SoundOn began with just 300 podcast episodes, but today it hosts over 10,000. According to the 2021 Sound Economy Report, released by SoundOn, between the start of the outbreak in Taiwan in May 2021 and the lowering of the alert level to Level 2 in July, the number of hours of podcasts created shot up, and even after the outbreak eased, unique downloads from the platform continued to grow at a rate of 200% per year. Andy Huang, who is CEO of SoundOn, says, “The pandemic has absolutely accelerated and catalyzed the take-off of the audio economy.”

But ultimately, the true reason for the rise of the “audio economy” is not simply the pandemic. Kentaro Ogata, founder of Japanese podcast platform Voicy, has offered this analysis: Advancements in voice technologies (speech recognition, voiceprint recognition, etc.), the popularization of listening devices like smart speakers and wireless headphones, and the expansion of listening habits, are the biggest factors driving the growth of the audio economy.

Seeing the potential for development in the audio market, the major US tech giants Google, Amazon, Meta, and Apple have all made moves, while Microsoft, Twitter, Spotify, and others have also turned their attention to podcasts and online voice communities.

Reading with your ears

Taiwan, where about 40,000 new books are published each year, has been a little slower in taking up audio offerings than elsewhere, mainly because continental markets like Europe and the United States, due to their vast territory, have people commuting and traveling long hours more frequently, providing greater demand for audio products that can be consumed with the ears rather than the eyes.

“Another reason is that Taiwan’s publishing industry is dominated by small and medium-sized enterprises,” opines Hsu Shu-ching of Mirror Voice. Paper, digital, and audio are the three main axes of the publishing industry at present. The transition from paper books to e-books is a relatively simple one, but going from print to audio involves revising, recording, mixing, and editing along with new forms of design, merchandising, and marketing, and all of this is not only expensive but also takes a similar amount of effort to republishing a paper book. In addition, the Taiwanese public has not yet gotten into the habit of consuming audiobooks, which has caused most publishers to hold back.

In 2019, On the Road became the first audiobook publisher to be established in Taiwan, kicking off the domestic market.

Its CEO, Vivi Wu, says that she started developing audio products simply because she was optimistic about the energy of the publishing sector in Taiwan. There are more than 1,000 publishing houses in Taiwan and about 40,000 new books are published ­every year. However, except for long-selling products, most disappear from the shelves after just three months. “We have all this great content on our hands; why should we just let it die?” she asks passionately.

In Wu’s analysis, editing audio products is not too different from editing print books. “Designing lessons, digging up the most essential and interesting knowledge, and rearranging and organizing it is what editors have always done.” However, she adds, “In terms of product under­standing and technology, the two are very different.”

In order to open up the various nodes involved in this multidisciplinary “translation” effort, Mirror Media’s audio platform Mirror Voice took the bold step of installing five recording studios early on, along with setting up Mirror Voice Academy to recruit and train voice talent and create the first one-stop-shop in the industry in Taiwan.

The establishment of Mirror Voice was the brainchild of Mirror Fiction CEO Tung Cheng-yu. Tung was already an enthusiastic consumer of audio products, and so lever­aging her keen market acumen and the resources of the Mirror group—including the ability of their news platform to generate content for podcasts, and the existing array of works and writers published by Mirror Fiction—she was able to create a synergy that quickly made Mirror Voice, with both subscription and purchase models, a promising prospect for becoming the Netflix of Chinese-language audio content.

Andy Huang, one of the founders of Goodnight and CEO of SoundOn.

SoundOn, which has experienced a boom in both creators and users during the pandemic, has become a symbol of the arrival of the age of the audio economy.

Content is king

Aside from technical problems, Vivi Wu says, “The most difficult thing was that we just had no idea where our target audience was.” After selling a few titles, the team finally found that most of the listeners who paid for audiobooks were readers coming over from hardcopy books. “The product positioning is close to that of printed books, so basically the content is still the main thing.”

However, while the cost of making a podcast is quite low, and most are distributed free, audiobooks are much more expensive to produce, making them often more expensive than their hardcopy counterparts. That being so, those in the industry aim to elevate the quality to help differentiate them from podcasts, which are usually just some people chatting.

Thinking about the historical development of voice media, Wu was inspired to invite a scriptwriter to create the audio drama The Norse Mythology Trilogy. “Myths and sagas are based on oral tradition, so doing audiobooks without doing mythology would just be weird.” She specially invited a voice director and a dozen voice actors to participate. “I wanted to really reach a high level, to set a standard that no one could surpass.”

Hsu Shu-ching cites the book Niche: Why the Market No Longer Favours the Mainstream, written by British journalist and social analyst James Harkin, to illustrate that in the era of segmented markets, to accurately capture a target customer group you need not only quality content, but also precise targeting. “You need to make the best content, content that’s worth the audience spending their time listening to.” Having set off on a firm footing with a focus on quality, Mirror Voice’s future sales need not be limited to the local market but could even expand internationally.

On the Road, which focuses on audio products, kicked off the audio economy in Taiwan.

Production values for audiobooks are high, to the point that an adaptation involves almost as much work as publishing a whole new book. In this picture, we see voice actors Song Kejun (left) and Sung Yu Tsung (right) recording The Norse Mythology Trilogy. (courtesy of On the Road)

The age of integration

In the fourth quarter of 2019, local e-book platform Readmoo launched into the audiobook world, followed soon by fellow e-book platform Kobo. In just two or three years since, a number of online platforms for audio products have been established. By the fourth quarter of 2021, Taiwan’s largest online bookstore, Books.com.tw, which is Taiwan’s most popular e-commerce venture among book lovers, added audiobooks to its e-book offering, in a move that is seen as an important milestone in the develop­ment of the audio market.

On the publishing side, large publishing houses such as Cité Publishing and China Times Publishing have taken the plunge into producing audiobooks. The number of products and the obvious growth in the consumer market led Readmoo to dub 2021 “The Year of the ­Audio­book.”

As well as their own audio products, Mirror Voice also host other publishers’ content on their platform. (courtesy of Mirror Voice)

As part of their effort to become an all-in-one audio producer, Mirror Voice established Mirror Voice Academy to train voice actors and program hosts. (courtesy of Mirror Voice)

Reviving writers

The rise of such audio products marks a nascent transition from the “eyeball economy” to the “audio economy.” The former is represented by film and television and their competition for the attention of consumers. However, the latter can be seamlessly integrated into people’s everyday lives, from commuting or doing housework to bathing or even lying in bed before one goes to sleep. “I just put on my headphones and I’m in the zone,” says Andy Huang, who is an avid podcast listener. “Sometimes, listening is just about a feeling of companionship.” In particular, the way audio products make it possible to multitask makes them better suited for busy modern people. “I wouldn’t say it creates a parallel space–time, but it absolutely can get you an extra four or five hours in your day, no problem,” says Hsu, weaving a wonderful metaphor. Audio products also don’t discriminate—you’ll have hip young consumers who love their wearable tech paying for them, but they are also totally friendly to elderly people with failing eyesight. The potential market is enormous.

As far as audiobooks are concerned, hearing a story told by someone else has its own unique “recreative” charm. On the Road once invited well-known voice actor Dean Hsiao to read the translation of the best-­selling novel A Gentleman in Moscow, while Mirror Media has had theater director Tsai Pao-chang read Kevin Chen’s Ghost Town and Golden Horse Best Leading Actor Mo Tzu-yi read the memoir of historian Yu Ying-shih. Even former culture minister Cheng Li-chun was invited by Linking Books to read her own new translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. With such accomplished voices behind them, such works create a whole new level of business opportunity.

A text is like a musical score and the human voice like an instrument, with each performer’s particular inter­pret­a­tion imbuing it with a certain intangible spirit. And so, in this age of sound, we are lucky enough to be able to roam the multiverse at will, opening portals across space and time, so long as we just open our ears.

Mirror Voice’s products are targeted squarely at their audience’s ears, bringing them the content they want. (courtesy of Mirror Voice)

Golden Horse Best Leading Actor Mo Tzu-yi voiced the audiobook of Yu Ying-shih's memoir. (courtesy of Mirror Voice）