Spotify has taken a new route and is investing heavily in books. The streamer, which has 220 million subscribers, has made 150,000 audiobooks available for free to customers in the UK, Ireland and Australia as part of a deal with Big Five publishers that it plans to roll out globally in the coming months. Suggested titles include a new Robert Galbraith mystery by JK Rowling and a book by Richard Osman. The ball that was missed and memoirs of the U2 singer. Enjoying Bono has never been easier.
How it works? It’s very simple: click on the audiobook you want and start streaming. The big limitation is that you can only listen to 15 hours of audiobooks per month. It’s okay if you want to hear Bono reminisce about his youth. But you have to move with the times as you dive into the epic tale of best-selling fantasy author Brandon Sanderson. The first part of existence Stormlight Archives saga is 45 hours of audiobook – three times longer than Spotify. But all is not lost here either. Premium subscribers can purchase an additional 10 hours of credit for £9.99.
Spotify has been eyeing audiobooks for a while now. In July 2022, the company paid $123 million (£101 million) for audiobook platform Findaway. Spotify founder Daniel Ek is one of the inspirations ContinuityScandinavian tech bro Lukas Matsson knows that the audience for audiobooks has grown significantly over the past decade. Last year, UK consumers spent £185 million buying a record 27 million audiobooks. Send just a fraction of that number to Spotify and the benefit to the streamer will be enormous.
But if Spotify is a potential winner in this shift to streaming audiobooks instead of purchasing them, who might be the losers? Spotify’s main target is Amazon, which dominates the audiobook market with its Audible service.
Audible’s model is very different from Spotify’s. Audiobooks are relatively expensive. The above The Way of Kings For example, Brandon Sanderson’s book costs £19.99. What Amazon really wants is for you to subscribe to Audible. For £7.99 a month you can download a book (of any length) every month and get access to a range of podcasts and exclusive Audible content (Alan Partridge’s first series). From OasthuisFor example).
Obviously, in this case, £7.99 is cheaper than the regular asking price of £19.99. But compare that to the all-you-can-eat audiobook and music menu that Spotify offers for £10.99, and some Audible users might be tempted to jump on the digital ship.
Spotify has promised to revolutionize audiobooks by introducing its subscribers to the joy of reading on the go. “Next year, about two billion people will read the book, and of them…” . Tens of millions of people listen to audiobooks,” said Alex Norström, co-president of the company, when Spotify announced the new service. “It’s good for the industry, publishers, authors and our users that we can reach hundreds of millions of people. And I think this sector is poised for growth.”
The publishing world is less turbulent. Publishers and creators will be aware of Spotify’s impact on music, which has destroyed the economy and devalued the product. Top artists like Ed Sheeran make millions, while 90 percent of artists have to survive on relative pittance. A musician whose song is streamed 100,000 times will receive just £300 according to Spotify’s royalty algorithm. If such rates were introduced for authors, mass impoverishment would occur.
It is understandable that the book industry is hesitant to move from this model to publishing. This is probably why many best sellers are not available on Spotify. For example, you can stream Robert Galbraith, but not Harry Potter.
“There is optimism that this will attract more people, which will increase overall audiobook sales and continue to grow the market,” said Michael Cobb, executive director of the Audio Publishers Association. Time. “I think there are concerns about this change in the business model. How will this ultimately affect not only what publishers get, but also what authors get from the sale?”
This is also a big gamble for Spotify. The company saw steady subscriber growth, up 18 percent in the 12 months ending August 2023. However, she never made a profit. Music licensing expert Phil Bird described the company as being in “permanent startup mode”, prioritizing expansion over revenue to keep investors happy.
But in its quest to continue growing, the company made mistakes, most famously its costly entry into podcasting. Spotify has invested more than $1bn (£824m) in podcasts, recruiting controversial voices such as Joe Rogan and spending more than £200m on two state-of-the-art podcast studios.
Then there was the infamous deal with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, which saw Spotify pay £20 million for their Archewell Audio podcast. In turn, the Sussexes only showed a season that could be completely skipped. Meghan Markle has interviewed celebrities such as Paris Hilton and Mindy Kaling, but the results have been disappointing (there are rumors that Taylor Swift declined the invitation). Daniel Ek later admitted that Spotify “paid too much for some podcasts compared to what we should have done.” The company’s podcast chief Bill Simmons was less diplomatic, calling the Sussexes “fucking scammers” on his own podcast.
Now that we’ve put that disaster behind us, Spotify seems confident that entering the audiobook industry will help retain existing subscribers and attract new ones. But as always, what’s good for Spotify may not be so good for the “content creators.” At Spotify’s launch event in New York, Ana Maria Allessi, vice president and publisher of Hachette Audio, weighed in on the positives, saying, “I see this as a great opportunity to be in the company of Joe Rogan, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé. ” .”
Some authors are less expansive. Using Audible, Amazon forced subscribers to pay £7.99 for an audiobook. But if Spotify trains listeners to expect books to be free accompaniments to their music, the perceived value of audiobooks could be undermined. “This is not a launch moment for publishers,” author Kim Scott told the paper. The newspaper “New York Times. “It’s Pandora’s box.”
Source: I News
I am Mario Pickle and I work in the news website industry as an author. I have been with 24 News Reporters for over 3 years, where I specialize in entertainment-related topics such as books, films, and other media. My background is in film studies and journalism, giving me the knowledge to write engaging pieces that appeal to a wide variety of readers.