A mere six months ago, the German tech company Lust Industries set out to innovate the adult entertainment industry through IT and social media. Based out of southern Germany, Lust Industries sees adult content as “by far the most exciting sector of the international entertainment industry” and are entering the scene as agents of progress, providing “funky new products” for fun, gadget-loving adults world-wide.
The first product that Lust Industries will release is an online content provider and mixing tool for erotic audio called Radiostim. Of course, Radiostim also functions as a social network where niche communities can share and alter the sounds that each other create, aiming to satisfy their own aural desires or someone else’s.
Radiostim is currently is beta and went through its first round of testing and review just a few weeks ago. Lust Industries hasn’t announced an official release date yet, but when I spoke with Lust Industries co-founder Daniel Wagner earlier this week, he told me that a limited-feature beta version will be publicly available soon. Here’s what else he had to say:
Jane Fader: Can you tell me a little bit more about why you decided to launch Lust Industries?
Lust Industries: Lust Industries is headed by three guys who consider adult entertainment to be the most exciting sector of the international entertainment industry. For us, adult entertainment is much more than just porn. Actually, we’re not so interested in hardcore pornography ourselves but we appreciate adult content that is enriching and stimulating. And since we see a certain potential for new and innovative products in this market we decided to found a company and to start developing Radiostim which is the main project we’re currently working on.
JF: What attracted you to working with audio rather than in a visual or a/v medium?
LI: One day back in 2010 we were talking about porn and hardcore videos and thought, well, in pretty much all those videos out there we’re confronted with certain things that do not turn us on at all, be it sexual practices, physical characteristics of the actors and stuff like that. We then discovered that, by closing your eyes and thus listening to a porn movie instead of watching it, the sexual experience can be much more intense and richer. By getting rid of the dominant visual layer you’re free to let your imagination go wild. Suddenly you’re not bound to any concrete faces, locations and sexual practices anymore. Instead you’re free to imagine almost anything you want while the acoustic layer of the porn movie in a way guides you through the events that are happening. Through that, the idea of Radiostim was born: No pornographic images, lots of sexually stimulating sounds, plus a couple of cool features. That’s the magic recipe we believe in.
JF: It sounds magical! I’ve noticed that audio is really overlooked as a feature in other erotic mediums. For example, its rare to ssee a “dirty talk” category on porn “tube” sites, and erotic audio books don’t tend to include much beyond word-based language. When Lust Industries started developing RadioStim, were you looking to fill this hole?
LI: When we started working on Radiostim we didn‘t really do an in-depth market research. We simply jumped off and built a first bunch of features that we thought could be cool. Then, over time, a sort of master plan evolved that we still follow today: We want Radiostim to take users on an acoustic journey into the world of lust and human sexuality. We want to satisfy all kinds of sexual demands by the means of stimulating sounds. If you‘re getting turned on by a couple having sex and talking dirty in a changing room of a mall, Radiostim will provide the right sounds for you. We want to achieve this by allowing users to build communities around their sexual desires. Artists will then be able to offer specialized sounds for these niche communities.
JF: AWESOME! Can you walk us through the user experience of Radiostim?
LI: There are basically two types of users: Those who are looking for stimulation (users) and those who want to stimulate others (artists). Those who are looking for stimulation visit radiostim.com, choose the kind of sex they want to hear (straight, gay, solo, couples, groups, etc.) and then pick a location where this sex should take place (a beach, a jungle, a UFO, a Wild West saloon, etc.). At the core of Radiostim is its audio player that combines the chosen sex sounds with the chosen ambient sounds and creates a unique streamable audio experience. Artists will be able to upload erotic audio files and offer them to the Radiostim community. Here is what makes Radiostim dynamic: a 15 minute sex audio file uploaded by an artist is divided into 30-second segments. Radiostim then uses these 30-second clips to create long sounds again by rearranging the pieces over and over again, literally every time a user clicks PLAY. So even if a user listens to the same kind of sex 1000 times in a row, it will never sound the same.
JF: What do you think of audio sex toy products such as the OhMiBod? Any possibility that Radiostim will be able to connect with a gadget like that in the future?
LI: OhMiBod seems to be pretty cool. Our first Radiostim tests have shown that music has a great impact on the accoustic perception of sex. So, yeah, why not bring different tools or gadgets closer together.
Read more about the prototype testing of Radiostim on the Lust Industries developer blog.