Hollywood rarely misses the opportunity to sell sex. And one buzzy app is capitalizing on that by combining smut and celebrity — bringing famous actors’ steamy voices directly into their listeners’ ears. Move over, coffee and tequila endorsements, there’s a new actor side hustle in town.
Caroline Spiegel founded audio erotica app Quinn when, as a senior in college, she experienced a “total loss of libido” while recovering from an eating disorder. After scouring the internet for solutions — and bemoaning how many sexual dysfunction drugs there were available to men in comparison to women — she was left disappointed.
“There was a dearth of options for erotic content for women,” Spiegel tells me, adding that she had to go deeper into internet community spaces to find erotica she appreciated. “I started thinking, ‘How can I bring erotica that women would enjoy into the mainstream?’ And I discovered audio erotica on Reddit and Tumblr and was like, ‘This is the ideal way to consume erotica. It’s so immersive.’”
Spiegel says she became so obsessed with the idea of audio romances that she wasn’t doing any homework, so she dropped out of college to create her startup, Quinn, which was launched as an app in 2021.
In 2022, Spiegel released her first Quinn Original, a premium series often voiced by actors and celebrities like Shawn Hatosy (“The Pitt”), Sam Heughan (“Outlander”), Andrew Scott (“Fleabag”) and Jesse Williams (“Grey’s Anatomy”). The company has released approximately 15 celebrity-narrated series thus far — a gambit that’s proved so successful it aims to do one a month going forward. Traditionally, the original series have featured one celebrity narrator as a protagonist speaking to the listener in an immersive story. This changed when “Heated Rivalry” actors Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams broke the formula, starring as two rival fae princes in “Ember & Ice,” Quinn’s most popular series to date.
“We definitely heard our users that they really liked being more of a fly on the wall, rather than a person in the story,” says Spiegel, so the next few projects will contain multiple voices.
Quinn’s audience is more than 80% women and subscriptions cost $7.99 a month or $59.99 a year. The company currently has 12 full-time employees. Spiegel says they brainstorm ideas for actors and themes based on what’s in the zeitgeist, tying the stories to specific moments in pop culture, then sprinkling in some evergreen stories throughout the year. Spiegel reached out to Storrie’s and Wiliams’ teams after seeing a trailer for their hockey romance series before HBO Max had even made its distribution deal with Canada’s Crave. Spiegel teased that this summer Quinn would also be introducing written projects. She says lately they’ve also been thinking about doing nostalgia-fueled projects, with fan-favorite voices from the early 2000s.
Pedro Pascal is the actor at the top of Quinn’s listeners’ wish list, and Spiegel says the company also gets a lot of requests from those hoping to hear Idris Elba and Matthew Gray Gubler whisper in their ear. She adds that one of the most interesting parts of the job has been pitching Quinn to talent and learning each person’s boundaries and questions. She reveals that some actors want to be in on the details of every line in the script, while others want to be in charge of choosing a story’s message, and some just want to speak to the director beforehand. For example, when Spiegel chatted with “Atlanta’s” Tyriq Withers about Quinn, she recalls, the actor expressed passion about how attractive consent is, so they worked it into his project, called “The Bodyguard,” about a special agent assigned to keep a U.S. diplomat safe while in Paris.
“From the first call when we talked to him, he was like ‘I think it’s really important to teach people about enthusiastic consent and how consent is sexy,’” says Spiegel. “That became the theme of his series and we worked with him on that.”
Spiegel says that a big impetus for starting Quinn Originals in the first place was to normalize erotica and make it more accessible for people to share and talk about it.
“It’s so much easier and more comfortable for people to say, ‘Did you see the “Heated Rivalry” guys are doing a Quinn audio?’ versus saying, ‘Hey, check out this audio erotica,’” Spiegel explains. She thinks it’s part of a bigger move toward investing in romantic storylines in general.
“Amazon has a whole slate of romance shows like ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ and ‘Off Campus,’ which was a very explicit book; there’s been ‘Bridgerton,’ ‘Fifty Shades of Grey,’” she says. “I think we’re seeing the increased visibility and normalization of explicit romantic content, and it’s definitely helping remove stigma and shame from consuming it.”
Her hope is that this can translate into shifting real-world dynamics as well. “Once we give people the words to be able to talk about what they want and what they like, sex becomes more safe and more enjoyable for people.”
And, as a bonus, listeners get their favorite actors whispering dirty talk into their earbuds as they wait for the next season of their favorite TV series to drop.