Spotify is giving paid subscribers 15 hours of audiobook listening per month

[Karlston]

It will launch first in Australia and the UK, and in the US this winter

Spotify gets serious about audiobooks

At a company event this afternoon, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek announced that Spotify subscribers in the UK, Australia, and, in the winter, the US will be able to stream 15 hours of premium audiobooks each month. It’s a big leap from Spotify’s initial a la carte audiobook model and has the potential to introduce millions of new listeners to the medium.

 

“I believe this will bring a whole new generation of listeners to audiobooks,” Ek said.

 

This iteration of Spotify’s audiobook business has been two years in the making. The company first announced its acquisition of audiobook distributor Findaway in November 2021, then introduced audiobook purchasing to the app last September. The purchasing experience was not good, though, and Spotify was happy to admit it: the company faced challenges in navigating Apple and Google’s in-app purchasing rules, which meant you can’t actually buy a book on most platforms.

 

This new model, based on subscription and listening hours, gets around the Apple issue and takes a pretty different approach from Audible, the industry’s biggest player. Audible, which is owned by Amazon, allows users to access audiobooks using a credit system (the standard $14.95 per month tier gives users one credit per month, with each audiobook costing one credit). On Spotify, users can try out as many audiobooks as they want from a set library, which includes 150,000 titles from all the major publishers, but caps the included listening at 15 hours. Users can then purchase an additional 10 hours of listening for $10.99.

 

Spotify’s approach has some advantages and disadvantages compared to Audible’s. On one hand, the browsability is a real plus, especially for listeners who are trying out audiobooks for the first time. That makes sense, given Ek’s previous assertion that audiobooks could be a $70 billion opportunity if only more people would listen to them. But the value based on book length could be a drawback for a certain kind of audiobook listener. Longer novels are not going to fit into 15 hours (for example, The Fellowship of the Ring is 19 hours), let alone hulking biographies and histories (the Napoleon Bonaparte biography in my Audible library is 32 hours — yes, Napoleon is my Roman Empire). Then again, you could probably squeeze in two Sally Rooney novels for the price of one. At least, assuming those titles are available.

 

The other thing to note is that library access through the premium subscription is not as comprehensive as Audible’s. Standard Audible subscribers can access any audiobook available on the platform, whereas the Spotify library available under the new plan includes 70 percent of bestsellers, according to Spotify spokesperson Grey Munford. That’s nothing to sniff at, but that also means a good chunk of top titles will be excluded. I have not been able to view the library yet, but I would imagine that 30 percent includes some of the super-premium titles. Those, however, would still be available for purchase using the a la carte system.

 

Which does actually make sense as a pricing structure for Spotify! It can entice users to try out audiobooks risk-free and get more money out of the heavy users. And if we can trust some leaked code references to Spotify’s forthcoming HiFi tier (or “Supremium” — hate it), users may get access to 30 hours of audiobook listening per month. Almost a whole Napoleon biography! 

 

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