Audio Porn Platform Quinn Streams Erotica to Your Ears

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 Wednesday 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.

It’s All in Your Head

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.

Listen Closely

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.”

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