Still, it’s unclear how Spotify users will adapt to paying for books one at a time, when many are accustomed to streaming music and shows on the platform for free or through a monthly subscription.
“And introducing another major outlet that has a built-in listening audience is a great thing.” “It’s introducing more competition into the marketplace,” said Chris Lynch, the president and publisher of the audio division at Simon & Schuster. Getting even a fraction of them to buy audiobooks could mean millions of new listeners for books. Spotify has 188 million paying subscribers globally. “It’s an opportunity to take their heavy listeners in music and podcasts and get those listeners to try audiobooks,” said Michele Cobb, the executive director of the Audio Publishers Association. Many in the publishing world are hopeful that Spotify will convert some of its users into audiobook lovers. Some analysts and investors are also skeptical of Spotify’s heavy investment in podcasts. Their stock price has tumbled over the last year, and is now lower than when the company went public in 2018. While the company has grown substantially in terms of content, subscribers, users and revenue, it has still never reported an annual profit. Spotify’s audiobook push is a gamble for the company, which added podcasts, comedy performances and other spoken-word entertainment to its offerings and announced its ambition to become the leading service for all things audio. For the moment, its audiobook hub is only available to Spotify users in the United States. Zicherman added that Spotify aims to improve curation in the audiobook marketplace, and to study its users’ engagement with different titles so that it can eventually develop an algorithmic audiobook recommendation engine, similar to the way the service recommends music based on listeners’ tastes. “Just as Spotify has changed the way that people create and listen to music and podcasts, we believe we can do the same thing over time with audiobooks, by offering new formats, new ways to interact with content and new ways to discover.” “We believe we have the potential to massively expand the audience for audiobooks,” Nir Zicherman, the head of audiobooks at Spotify, said during a news conference on Monday.
Despite the recent growth, they said, audiobooks represent less than a 7 percent share of the wider book market. Spotify’s executives see an even bigger opportunity, they said. Last year, nearly 74,000 audiobooks were released, compared to some 7,200 in 2011. Audiobook revenues totaled $1.67 billion last year, up 25 percent from 2020, according to the Audio Publishers Association. Executives declined to detail the revenue sharing model with publishers, but said that prices will vary per title and will be in line with other retailers.ĭigital audio has grown by double digits year-over-year for more than a decade. In a surprising shift away from its all-you-can-listen ethos, Spotify is selling audiobooks à la carte, rather than offering a subscription service. Now Spotify’s move into audiobooks could reshape what has become a rapidly growing category for publishers. The company transformed the music industry when it gave listeners access to a seemingly limitless catalog of songs through its streaming music service more than a decade ago.
Spotify made the lucrative audiobook market more competitive on Tuesday, when it debuted a new hub on its app with more than 300,000 titles, among them books by best-selling authors like Colleen Hoover, Michelle Obama and Stephen King.
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