A Brief History of Audio Porn

Audio sex has likely been around since the days of cavemen and cavewomen. Recorders weren’t available back then, so we’ll never know for sure.

What we do know is that couples have been “talking dirty” to each other for centuries. Storytelling has been a part of being human for thousands of years – and where there are stories, there are naughty stories.

Countless historical books feature risque (at least for the times) passages. Eventually, publishers realized that books featuring just the naughty parts would be in high demand. A new industry was born.

From books, erotica eventually found its way into movies. At some point in the twentieth century, what started out as a few obscene phone calls would eventually develop into the 1-900 phone sex industry. For many years, people would pay to take part in live phone calls – either with a single operator or a group chat line – where all types of kinky fetishes could be explored in audio format from the privacy of suburban homes.

In the 1990s, improved internet connections allowed people to start sharing erotic audio files online. In the early days of the internet, when people mostly used Usenet, audio was easier to share than video porn because video files required more bandwidth and more hardware once it was finally downloaded. The adoption of the MP3 – a smaller standardized file format with decent quality – in the late 1990s helped to kick off an online audio boom.

By the late 1990s, early text sex story sites like Literotica began experimenting with publishing erotic audio files – in addition to the sharing already happening in Usenet and on file sharing software like Napster.

The 2007 launch of the iPhone made audio recording and listening available to many more people. Android followed a few years later with even lower priced phone models. The smartphone ushered in an era of easy-to-use apps, making recording audio as simple as hitting a few buttons and talking. For the first time, editing, file format conversions, equalizing, sound effects, multi-track recording, and more were available to everyone.

Today, there are countless websites, web apps, apps, and software made to share audio stories – many of them specific to erotic audio. We will discuss more of those in a future article.