Sex has always sold in Hollywood. This popular app is changing how

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Hollywood rarely misses the opportunity to sell sex.And one buzzy app is capitalizing on that by combining smut and celebrity — bringing famous actors’ steamy voices directly into their listeners’ ears.

Move over, coffee and tequila endorsements, there’s a new actor side hustle in town.Caroline Spiegel founded audio erotica app Quinn when, as a senior in college, she experienced a “total loss of libido” while recovering from an eating disorder.After scouring the internet for solutions — and bemoaning how many sexual dysfunction drugs there were available to men in comparison to women — she was left disappointed.“There was a dearth of options for erotic content for women,” Spiegel tells me, adding that she had to go deeper into internet community spaces to find erotica she appreciated.

“I started thinking, ‘How can I bring erotica that women would enjoy into the mainstream?’ And I discovered audio erotica on Reddit and Tumblr and was like, ‘This is the ideal way to consume erotica.It’s so immersive.’”Spiegel says she became so obsessed with the idea of audio romances that she wasn’t doing any homework, so she dropped out of college to create her startup, Quinn, which was launched as an app in 2021.In 2022, Spiegel released her first Quinn Original, a premium series often voiced by actors and celebrities like Shawn Hatosy (“The Pitt”), Sam Heughan (“Outlander”), Andrew Scott (“Fleabag”) and Jesse Williams (“Grey’s Anatomy”).

The company has released approximately 15 celebrity-narrated series thus far — a gambit that’s proved so successful it aims to do one a month going forward.Traditionally, the original series have featured one celebrity narrator as a protagonist speaking to the listener in an immersive story.

This changed when “Heated Rivalry” actors Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams broke the formula, starring as ...