“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.

Audio books on spotify