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Spotify is seriously getting into audiobooks, now offering premium subscribers 15 hours of listening per month with access to over 150,000 reads.
The new feature, also available to plan managers of Family and Duo accounts, is now available in the UK and Australia. America will be later, after next year.
Readers can access audiobooks within the Premium catalog, which Spotify says includes “more than 70% of the best-selling books.” The catalog integrates books from major publishing houses such as Hachette, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster. For example, Hachette is putting more than 7,000 titles on Spotify, while HarperCollins and Penguin Random House have provided their entire audio collections to the platform.
After the initial 15-hour listening period expires, Spotify users can purchase top-ups to continue listening to books. The average audiobook takes eight to 12 hours to listen to.
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“So [listeners] One can finish by focusing on one title, or open ten books and slowly work their way through them all. This flexibility is a real benefit of our product,” said Owen Smith, head of audiobooks product and tech at Spotify.
Spotify has made a slow and steady bid to make its platform a “seamless one-stop destination for everything audio.” Their foray into the podcast space has faced some recent hiccups, but they continue to partner with big voices and creators.
Last year, Spotify announced the release of 300,000 of its audiobook titles available for purchase. CEO Daniel Eck estimated that the industry could be worth $70 billion, saying: “We believe that audiobooks, in their many different forms, will be a huge opportunity.”
This latest move – to integrate audiobooks into the subscription model – makes their place in the audiobook space even more solid. It also makes it a distinct competitor to Amazon’s Audible, the market leader that uses a credit system instead.
