Spotify Premium Is Getting Audiobooks, But Don't Expect Unlimited Streaming
Spotify is once again betting on the charm of audiobooks as it aims to outpace the likes of Apple and Amazon. The company has today announced that Spotify Premium subscribers will be able to enjoy 15 hours of free audiobook listening each month. The company says it is making available a selection of over 150,000 audiobooks to its paying customers, of which there are more than 200 million across the globe.
But it's not going to be a free lunch. Only books labeled "Included in Premium" will be available for free listening — and if you exhaust the monthly listening quota but desperately want to finish an ongoing audiobook before your next billing cycle, you will have to buy an additional 10 hours of listening priced at $10.99. That's the same amount as an individual Spotify Premium subscription.
The audiobook perk has started going live for folks in Australia and New Zealand, and it will make its way to the U.S. market in the coming months. Spotify will also offer the ability to download audiobooks for offline listening, as long as the runtime falls within the assigned listening quota for that month. Of course, if you end up liking a title, you can always purchase it from Spotify's audiobook storefront instead, bypassing the streaming cap altogether.
A delicate game of competition and compensation
Spotify's latest gamble is a direct assault on the dominance of Audible, which is owned by Amazon. Moreover, it's a sound diversification strategy that would put Spotify in a stronger position compared to the likes of Apple Music, Amazon Prime Music, and YouTube. But just like music labels and artists before, Spotify's latest strategy has now also rattled writers and publishing houses, who fear that free audiobook listening will devalue their work in the same way that streaming did for music.
"The agents worry that paying publishers for the amount of time that people listen to a book could eat into lucrative à la carte payments," says a report in The New York Times. According to Financial Times, Spotify is paying publishers in the same fashion as it does to music labels — by the number of hours a title is listened to. However, not every publisher is fully committed to Spotify's vision.
A major concern is that earnings from hours listened per user will be far smaller compared to a person paying the full price for an audiobook. But Spotify is also taking a cautious approach by not pushing its entire audiobook library into the freemium landscape. The company introduced audiobooks to its platform with a digital shelf of over 300,000 titles late in 2022. A tussle over revenue sharing with Apple forced a quick departure from the iOS app, and now users are asked to buy audiobooks from Spotify's web storefront.