Spotify Ready To Take On Amazon In Audiobooks

Music streaming giant Spotify has revealed that it's intending to make a big splash in the audiobooks business. Trusted Reviews reports: At the company's Investor Day 2022, CEO Daniel Ek revealed that the company would be branching out into audiobooks following its successful music and podcast offerings. Several months ago, Spotify announced its agreement to acquire audiobook distribution platform Findaway, which was a surefire indicator that it was thinking big in this area. Whie that deal has yet to close, Ek has confirmed that he sees audiobooks as "a massive opportunity."

The overall book market today is worth $140 billion, yet audiobooks only represent 6 to 7% of that. In the most developed audiobook markets that figure is closer to 50%, so Spotify as seeing this as a potential $70 billion market that it's going to compete with Amazon and its Audible platform for. Spotify revealed that it's planning to relaunch the audiobook arm of its streaming service later this year. As this suggests, you can already access audiobooks through Spotify, but it's not a particularly well fleshed out offering, and it's not easily accessible. No specifics were mentioned on the pricing of this audiobook offering.

Text to Speech

[Bite The Pillow]

Project Gutenberg and text to speech are good enough, compete with that. Unless you have a great reader who understands the characters and setting, there's little difference. Ready Player One with Wil Wheaton was the perfect choice.

You have to be standout to compete with TTS and I'm not buying middling attempts.

Re:

[jlar]

Project Gutenberg and text to speech are good enough, compete with that. Unless you have a great reader who understands the characters and setting, there's little difference.

But only for older literature. And text to speech may be good enough in English but in most other languages I doubt the experience will be acceptable.

How?

[fermion]

Books and movies both benefit from online sales. It reduces the second hand market, and ir is more trouble than it is worth to pirate either.

With music, sales were plummeting due to people making exact replicas on their Nomads. In today dollars, this was $40 loss in sales per CD back in 1990. It was divesting. iTunes and streaming was the only path to renew sales.

On the other hand, I see no reason for any book agent to acepta a deal less than Audible would pay. There is no compulsory licensing. It would

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always wanted to have a selection of Audiobooks with COVID-19 content advisory labels.

Was that a joke or are you just stupid?

I hope they make some wise decisions

[lsllll]

My audiobook listed on Amazon for a whopping $24.95. Even I wouldn't pay that much to buy my book. But I had no choice. Audible (subsidiary of Amazon) got to choose the price. They listed it like that for about 18 months. Had I had a choice in the matter, I would have listed it a lot more reasonably, like $9.95 or something. It wasn't until a couple of months ago when they finally dropped the price to $7.95.

I hope, if Spotify gets into the business, that they allow more control to authors over their creations.

Re:I hope they make some wise decisions

[TwistedGreen]

Nobody really pays list price on Audible. Usually you subscribe for $14.95 and get 1 credit per month, which you can then use to redeem any book you choose regardless of the "list price." Often the list price is $50+ and it makes you feel like you're getting a bargain, although you'd have to be crazy to pay that. You can also buy more credits for a discount. It's rare to see an Audible book priced less than $14.95 because they want to make sure you stay subscribed. That said, if someone didn't want to spend their credit on your book, I can see why you would want the price to be more reasonable. Interesting that they have so much control over the pricing. In any case it will be good to see more competition in this space.

Re: I hope they make some wise decisions

[ToasterMonkey]

That does suck, even if you figure a five hour book is worth a $15 monthly credit, the other math kicks in, what am I going to listen to the rest of the month.

Thats probably part of why they sell extra credits in three packs, because when you're out and want a new book really bad, shorter books look more reasonable with the other two credits in your pocket.

Re:

[jabuzz]

Historically audio books where way more expensive than a printed book. However the cost of production of an audiobook has in the last 20 years fallen through the basement floor. The cost of digital distribution is also a fraction of the price of making cassettes or CD's. However they still seem to be priced as if it was still 1998.

The big problem for competition is that Audible/Amazon have much of the content tied up in exclusive contracts.

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[tlhIngan]

Historically audio books where way more expensive than a printed book. However the cost of production of an audiobook has in the last 20 years fallen through the basement floor. The cost of digital distribution is also a fraction of the price of making cassettes or CD's. However they still seem to be priced as if it was still 1998.

The cost of physical distribution isn't a lot more than digital distribution - for a real deadtree book, its around 10% of the cover price - that includes the printing, binding, s

Re:

[transporter_ii]

Yes. Also, they now include some "free" books with the subscription, and they also run sales all the time. They have a Daily Deal book in the 2 - 5 dollars. At least every few months, they run one good enough that I pick it up. They often have two books for one credit sales, as well as 50% off sales. And every year or so, they give you a free credit.

I often take a chance on these deals and get something I wouldn't normally buy. A few of these books have turned out to be some of my all time favorites.

I gripe

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[jlar]

My audiobook listed on Amazon for a whopping $24.95. Even I wouldn't pay that much to buy my book. But I had no choice. Audible (subsidiary of Amazon) got to choose the price. They listed it like that for about 18 months. Had I had a choice in the matter, I would have listed it a lot more reasonably, like $9.95 or something. It wasn't until a couple of months ago when they finally dropped the price to $7.95.

I hope, if Spotify gets into the business, that they allow more control to authors over their creations.

I am pretty sure that Audible sets the optimal price for the audiobook in the sense that it is optimizing their revenue (not necessarily yours since they may also factor in subscriber retention etc and your optimal price would also include improvements to your brand that can increase revenue for future books). My guess is however that you could not have set a price which gave you more revenue than the price they set. Given that I doubt that you will have any influence on your creations on Spotify (which wil

Re:

[natha01]

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No thanks

[bl968]

Spotify is still on my do not do business with list...

Great

[kunwon1]

So now my spotify app is going to force me to scroll through a lot more fucking podcasts while I'm looking for music, as they try to make this bullshit work

Re:

[kunwon1]

s/podcasts/audiobooks/

need to type slower..

That's great, now could you please....

[gillrock]

Dear Spotify,

Congratulations on your branching into the audiobook market. Now for all that is good and decent in this world, could you please put some funding and energy into allowing us adults who have had our accounts totally infected, infested, and rendered completely useless by our children's musical taste fix the glitch without having to ditch the account and start over?

Some recommendations:
      - Bring back the dislike button
      - Allow the user to ban artists from being played
      - Allow the user to remove played items from their history

It might be your service, but it's my data, and I'd like some control over it.

Thank you.

Re:

[EmperorOfCanada]

These features you ask for strike me as an afternoon's worth of programming effort. Either their codebase is so spaghettified they can't get new features like this implemented and they are now stuck just periodically rearranging the interface and pretending to release new versions; or they are being manipulative bastards deliberately and they have weird deals struck with crap artists like drake and swift.

Why has this taken so long?

[EmperorOfCanada]

I have been saying this is the business model for audio books for about 7 years now. I listen to 3-5 audiobooks per month. There is exactly a zero percent chance I would buy that many through audible seeing that many of their digitally delivered audiobooks cost more than buying the same physical book.

I've long felt there was an arrogance to audible and their massive endless advertising across the digital universe always left a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe I am missing it but Spotify never advertised anywh

College

[richardwhite333]

I am very pleased with such news. When an ordinary music app gradually becomes educational. When I come back from university I find assignment help, use https://edubirdie.com/assignment-help [edubirdie.com] for that. At this time, I listen to an audiobook. Audiobooks are very popular these days. I really like this option, because when I just read I fall asleep.