Don't miss Fio, “the #1 Catholic alternative to Spotify and Audible,” with over 100,000 hours of Catholic content — all free of charge.
Whether an audiobook, podcast, or playlist, listening to something great makes mundane tasks so much more enjoyable — from your daily commute to doing the dishes.
A new Catholic streaming platform is built for all of those everyday moments. Calling itself “the #1 Catholic alternative to Spotify and Audible,” Fio features over 100,000 hours of trusted content from more than 1,000 Catholic creators around the world. It’s comparable to a “Spotify for Catholics,” and quickly has become one of the top Catholic streaming platforms.
Fio is available on iPhone, Android, and web at play.fio.fm. Its name is Latin for “I become,” drawn from St. John Paul II’s admonition to families to “Become what you are.”
“Fio is becoming exactly what we had dreamed it would be, a hub for all Catholic voices, artists, authors,” said Peter Buonincontro, co-founder of Fio, in an interview with Aleteia. (Here’s our previous interview with Fio developers when the app was first released!)
Why a Catholic platform?
Why a Catholic-specific streaming service? Buonincontro and his co-founder Will Hickl, musician and co-founder of Novum Records, kept running into issues with secular streaming apps.
Besides lacking a way to seek out Catholic content, these platforms often offered Catholic content alongside content that actively conflicted with Catholic beliefs. Catholic creators and organizations had no direct way to reach the audiences they serve. Add to that the minimal royalties most platforms offer creators, and the two, with third co-founder Matthew Blake, became seriously interested in creating a strong alternative.
If you start using Fio, you’ll notice many familiar features: an on-demand music player, custom playlists, offline downloads, manual queuing. “The goal has always been the same: build a real high-end Catholic streaming platform,” Buonincontro said.
At the same time, a few things set Fio apart. There’s the Catholic focus, of course—admission is limited to practicing Catholics, and Fio reserves the right to remove at any time content that conflicts with the Catholic faith. That means Fio is a great choice for parents and educators to use with kids around, as the content is vetted already (and there’s an explicit filter too for extra peace of mind). Fio is already in use in over 100 countries, although the U.S. is its primary market.
Then there are the the royalties. Many Catholics want to support Catholic creators but don’t have an easy way to do so. Fio pays music streaming royalties at rates 3-5 times that of Spotify, and is the first platform to pay streaming royalties for podcasts, all of which makes it easier to support Catholic creators in making excellent content.
Fio also offers an advertising system, “something Catholic businesses had been asking for ever since Google and Meta stopped letting them target Catholic audiences directly,” Buonincontro said. “That cut off one of the more effective ways for a small Catholic business to reach the people most likely to care about what they do, and Fio gives them a way back to that.”
Always free, with optional upgrades
Recently Fio introduced premium subscriptions as well as Fio for Creators, a place for every creator on the platform to see their own analytics, manage their content, and request payouts directly.
But one big thing hasn’t changed. “Fio has been free from day one and always will be,” he said.
While the free version of Fio includes unlimited streaming and up to 2 custom playlists, users can opt for two types of paid subscriptions. Premium subscriptions ($9.99/month or $99.99/year) bring ad-free listening, unlimited custom playlists, offline music downloads, and up to 15 hours/month of access to the audiobook library. The Audiobooks+ tier ($19.99/month or $199.99/year) expands audiobook access to 25 hours/month.
The app adds 450+ hours of new content weekly, so there’s always something new to hear, especially with its large library of “Fio Originals,” exclusive original content. Unlike Audible, which uses a credit system, Fio offers a simple subscription for full access to all its audiobooks—with a library that pulls from well-known Catholic publishers like TAN Books, Pauline Books & Media, Sophia Institute Press, Scepter, and the Theology of the Body Institute, plus podcasts you know and love like Abiding Together, The Word on Fire Show, and Pints with Aquinas.
Built for a Catholic lifestyle
We couldn’t help wondering — for Catholics who already use popular streaming apps like Hallow or Formed, how does Fio differ?
“We're genuinely glad they exist and think highly of both,” Buonincontro said, but clarified that Fio’s difference is scale of available library and openness, plus offering different kinds of content, saying:
Hallow is built for prayer, a quiet, focused space for that part of the day. Fio is built for everything around it: the commute, the workout, the kitchen, the school day. Someone could easily use both for different moments of the day. Alongside prayer content, Bible studies, and homilies, Fio also carries the indie Catholic creators making content around hip-hop, business, news, culture, science, and more.
We're built as a place where any Catholic creator or organization can upload their work and know that everyone who might hear it is already Catholic. We see Fio as complementary to what Hallow is doing, not as a replacement for it.
Formed is built mostly around Augustine Institute content: long-form video, Catholic films, and structured study series. They do that very well, and there's some overlap with our podcast library, but Formed is really its own thing, a place for Catholic educational and family video content specifically.
Check out what’s new at Fio and enjoy listening to a great streaming app filled with vetted Catholic music, podcasts, and audiobooks, all while supporting Catholic creators so they can continue to make content that feeds the soul.
