Spotify to Offer 150K Audiobooks with Premium Subscription

Spotify today announced what the future holds for its audiobook service.

At an event at its New York offices on Tuesday afternoon, the company announced a new business model that will give Spotify Premium subscribers access to a subset of its audiobook catalog - 150,000 titles in total - at no additional cost.
The service will launch first in the UK and Australia from today, with a US launch later this year.
"There is a huge dominant player in audiobooks today. Just as with music and podcasting, we believe many more consumers want to consume and listen to audiobooks," said Daniel Ek, founder and CEO of Spotify. "Just like with music and podcasting, we're really excited to be able to bring all the great tools we've built for both creators and consumers to the world to enable more discovery of these great audiobooks," he added.


Powered by its acquisition of digital audiobook distributor Findaway, Spotify first launched audiobooks in the US in September 2022 with a catalog of 300,000 titles, expanding to other English-speaking markets later in the year and Canada in early 2023. At the service's launch last year, Spotify talked up the company's potential to tap into a growing market, noting that audiobooks only have a 6% to 7% share of the broader book market, but that the category is growing 20% year-over-year.
However, using Spotify's service hasn't been as seamless as it could be for consumers, as the company has tried to get around app stores' rules on in-app purchases by requiring users to buy audiobooks from the Spotify website in order to play them in its app. Spotify was also unable to redirect customers to its website due to the app stores' "anti-redirection" rules, which prevent app developers from pointing to alternative payment methods other than the app stores' own payment mechanisms.
With access to audiobooks as part of its premium service, listening to books will become easier for end users.

Ek stated that this change will help the company by increasing user engagement with Spotify as well as reducing churn. In addition, he said, "it will give our business a great deal of flexibility, which will ultimately help our revenue and profits."
The company also suggested that the audiobook market today is a distribution and discovery problem that Spotify aims to solve in the same way it does for music and podcasts.
"Tens of millions of Premium subscribers are already interested in listening to audiobooks," said Alex Norström, Spotify co-president and chief operating officer. "They just need the opportunity."


Norström also noted that estimates suggest that 2 billion people will read books this year, but the audiobook slice of that pie remains small.
While Spotify's larger audiobook catalog has launched with 300,000 titles, only half of these are available through a Premium subscription. While subscribers can read as many books as they want, the service will be limited to 15 hours per month. However, users will be able to get more time by purchasing an additional 10 hours as "top-ups".
Alongside the launch, Spotify will provide users with editorial book recommendations as well as personalized recommendations based on users' tastes.
"We'll feature editorial recommendations made by a diverse team of experts. And they will appear in the audiobooks hub," explained David Kaefer, Spotify's Vice President, Head of Audiobooks. The hub will also feature featured shelves highlighting popular genres.
"We'll also have a streamlined rating system," Kaefer continued: "We will also offer recommendations driven by a streamlined rating system. "This is something that every listener will get as soon as they access their app. And it will ask users to select some of their favorite titles and favorite genres. That's how we'll start to learn how we can recommend the right titles to each listener," Kaefer added.


Kaefer said testing is already underway to personalize audiobook recommendations, which will also appear in the app's Home feed, putting them in front of tens of millions of people every day.
Authors, meanwhile, will gain access to new tools they can use to grab users' attention, such as promotional cards they can customize with images. Later, Spotify will work on more advanced tools that will allow authors to understand how their work is performing.
When this feature rolls out to supported markets, there will be a flag next to existing audiobooks included in the Premium offer, so subscribers will know they can stream the book for free.
Users will also be able to share their favorite audiobooks on social media and create audiobook playlists with built-in sharing tools.
"We have instant access. We have discovery. We have front and center placement, easy social amplification, and custom tools," Kaefer concluded. "And all of this will help increase the number of audiobook listeners and help listeners engage with the format with less friction."

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