Spotify ups audiobook push with free hours for premium users
The world’s largest music streaming service is hedging a bet the monthly incentive for Aussie and UK premium subscribers will help sell more titles.
Spotify has hedged a bet that giving its premium subscribers access to about 1.5 audiobooks each month will ramp up its ability to sell titles.
Australian and UK premium subscribers will be the first in the world to receive the new offering from Wednesday, which includes access to 15 hours worth of audiobooks each month.
Spotify vice president David Kaefer told The Australian he believed the company’s approach, which he likened to selling audiobook titles in increments rather than whole, could change competition in the market.
“Most models that are popular out there give users access to one book or two books at a time. Here you can listen to one book and spend all your 15 hours on that or you could have 10 books open at a time,” he said.
The company had a particular focus on users who had not yet tried audiobook services, and hoped the ability to play a couple of hours of different titles might turn them into paying customers. “It’s going to encourage an awful lot of people to try audiobooks who might not have tried it before,” he said.
Spotify’s audiobook catalogue includes over 150,000 titles however not all will be made available to users with some only available via purchase, similar to how Kobo and Amazon offer separate subscription programs for ebooks and audiobooks on their platforms.
When Spotify first introduced the ability to purchase audiobooks in November last year, a number of titles from Australian authors including journalists Trent Dalton and Benjamin Law were among those available.
The increased push into audiobooks arrives as Spotify among other streaming services appear to be pulling back on podcasts. Last week Google announced that it would sunset its podcasting app and integrate the service into its YouTube Music app.
Spotify was one of the first platforms to really bet big on podcasts, investing more than $1bn to sign deals for exclusive access to certain podcasters and their work.
“When we built an audience for podcasts, we were really the first app to say ‘hey, we’re gonna put podcasts alongside music’, and people thought that was an odd choice,” Mr Kaefer said.
“Now it just seems so natural and people want to switch between one and the other. This is really a third content type.
“We think it’ll take some time to build user behaviour around it and for people to discover this when they want to listen to an audio book versus a podcast, and also for us to know when to recommend one of those things to them.”
Unlike podcasts, which include ads inserted by the authors, audiobooks will remain completely ad free.
Spotify is not considering including a narrated function in which an artificially generated voice narrating previews between chapters as it had for music with a function called AI DJ, Mr Kaefer said.
Spotify believes the new offering will not increase competition with physical books as the streaming platform is typically used while multi-tasking rather than single-focus.
“People tend to use Spotify during multi-tasking moments; it’s when I’m driving to work, it’s when I’m taking my kid to school or when I’m cooking dinner,” Mr Kaefer said.
“We’re really not competing for those moments. We’re competing for those multi-tasking moments. We definitely think we’re gonna grow by the amount of time people are spending in those sorts of sessions.”
The audiobook push comes after Spotify increased the price of its premium subscription tier in September this year when the monthly rate rose to $12.99 per month.
Users who run out of their monthly audiobook hours will be able to purchase top-ups in 10 hour increments which will last for 12 months.
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