Caroline Spiegel’s Porn Revolution

Birds chirp and wind rustles through leaves—the sounds of early fall.

“Man, it’s beautiful out here,” remarks a deep, crackly male voice. “All the trees, the green. The leaves are just starting to turn colors.

“What are you looking at me like that for?” he continues, chuckling. “No, I know that look. You are up to something naughty.

“Whoa, whoa, hang on,” he says with mock resignation. “There are people over by the edge of the lake. You don’t think they’re going to see us?”

The birds continue to sing. Leaves crinkle.

“Wow, OK.” The voice deepens. “If you want to.”

I hit pause on this audio narration and take a deep breath, glancing over at my officemates in The Information’s New York newsroom. I hope nobody can see me blushing, as I stream the audio clip “On the Lake” on Quinn, the three-year-old audio erotica app founded by Caroline Spiegel, a 24-year-old Stanford University dropout and the younger sister of Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel.

The mystery man I’m listening to goes by the name of Bad Influence, and he is one of Quinn’s most popular creators. In real life, B.I., as I’ll call him, lives in Brooklyn, working behind the camera in the (traditional) film industry. He stumbled across the world of audio porn through an open casting call, and is now one of Quinn’s most popular creators. His top episode, a 10-minute steamy reunion called “Rough Return,” has been played over 33,000 times.

While some of B.I.’s relatives and close friends know about his career as an audio porn performer, he prefers to keep an air of mystery around his actual identity. “I think that sometimes it’s better for my listeners to imagine me exactly how they’d like,” he says.