Meet Fio: the Catholic alternative to Spotify aiming to bring faith to your playlists
For many Catholics, faith formation often competes with busy schedules and endless digital distractions. Fio, a Catholic audio streaming platform, hopes to change that by putting faith-filled content at listeners’ fingertips.
Dubbed “the Catholic alternative to Spotify,” the platform offers a growing library of podcasts, audiobooks, and music, giving users a way to stay connected to their faith wherever life takes them.
Currently, Fio is being used in over 100 countries, is host to over 100,000 hours of Catholic content, and has over 1,000 Catholic creators putting their work onto the platform.
Will Hickl, co-founder of Fio, has been in the music industry for 15 years as a musician and founder of the Catholic record label Novum Records. During his career, he realized that secular platforms were not built for faith-based work — it was difficult to stand out, there was no fair compensation, and there was no community around it.
With this in mind, Hickl, and co-founder Peter Buonincontro, launched Fio in 2023. The first version of the app hosted podcasts alone. The following year music was added, and the following year — thanks to a generous investor — the platform was able to host audiobooks and grow their collection of content.
In an interview with EWTN News, Hickl shared that the platform’s “North Star” is the fact that he cares deeply about the artists and content creators.
“We are a platform who, because we care, weʼre paying a penny per stream, which is already three to four times what Spotify pays,” he explained. “We want to offer better exposure and tooling. In fact, we already offer better exposure because a musician doesnʼt have to compete with 10 million other musicians. Thereʼs only maybe like 100, maybe 200 artists on the platform right now…thereʼs greater discoverability.”
For creators, he hopes they would know that Fio “is the one that genuinely cares about them more than Apple or Spotify ever will.”
Currently, Fio offers three subscription levels for listeners — free, premium, and audiobooks +. While users who subscribe to the platform for free will have to listen to advertisements, Hickl pointed out that these ads “are reserved and curated for Catholic businesses, Catholic ministries, and then Catholic artists on the platform.”
He also emphasized that these faith-based advertisements can also serve as a “cultural safeguard” so that parents who may be listening with children present don’t have to worry about inappropriate advertisements being played, as is the case with many secular platforms.
Hickl explained that Fio aims to serve three different cohorts: Catholic creators, consumers, and businesses.
“We are an artist first platform. We want to give you the best exposure, the best economics than any other platform,” he said. “For consumers, we want to give you greater choice, a better experience in terms of what you find, what your kids are exposed to. The third would be Catholic businesses who canʼt target based on religion on Facebook or Google or YouTube or anything like that. So weʼre offering a greater targeting mechanism, greater value in that regard.”
For those seeking to have their content on Fio, they must go through a submission and review process. Before their content is accepted, creators must affirm that they are practicing Catholics who accept the teachings of the Church. They must also verify that their work was not primarily created by artificial intelligence. Lastly, each creator goes through a manual review process by the Fio team before their work is allowed to be on the platform.
Looking to the future, the team at Fio is working on creating original content for the platform as well as being able to host video podcasts and music videos. Additionally, they are working to give Fio a more “liturgical feel.” For example, if there’s an important saint’s feast day, Fio would make suggestions to listeners of a podcast that talks about the saint or a song inspired by the saint.
Hickl hopes that one day more artists will “be more excited about sharing their Fio link than the Spotify link.”
He added that he hopes Catholics “would know I can trust this platform, it can and should be a part of my every day, because thereʼs so much treasure to discover.”
“Thatʼs something I say a lot, which is that the Church has an immense amount of treasure and we just donʼt know about it. And so I want people to know the treasure is here and Fio is a place where itʼs aggregated,” he said.
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