Mark Cuban’s Live Audio Play

Mark Cuban is getting back into audio.

The Dallas Mavericks owner is a co-founder of Fireside, a “next-gen” podcasting platform that will take aim at the live audio space when it launches sometime this year.

Fireside differs from popular audio app Clubhouse by allowing users to natively record conversations; it also reportedly plans to curate its selection of public speakers and offer creators the opportunity to monetize.

“Today we say goodbye to current media platform limitations created by one-way conversations, a lack of interactivity, and non-existent analytics,” co-founder Falon Fatemi wrote in an email to potential creative partners.

Live conversation apps are a hot commodity right now.

• Clubhouse raised $100 million in a Series B round led by Andreesen Horowitz at a reported valuation of $1 billion.
• Betty Labs, creator of sports-focused audio app Locker Room, raised $9.3 million in Google Ventures-led seed funding.
• Twitter is testing an audio chat feature called Spaces.

Cuban’s previous foray into audio ended with he and Todd Wagner’s $5.7 billion sale of Broadcast.com to Yahoo in 1999. He purchased the Mavericks for $285 million the next year. The team is now worth $2.58 billion.