Spotify has noted that by giving premium subscribers access to around 1.5 audiobooks a month, their ability to sell titles will be ramped up.
For the new offering, Australian and UK premium subscribers will gain access to 15 hours’ worth of audiobooks a month.
Vice President David Kaefer said he believed the approach could change competition within 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.”
Spotify focused on users who had yet to try their audiobooks services, and hoped being able to play a couple hours of different titles may 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.”
The audiobook category on the app includes over 150,000 titles, but not all will be available to users with some only available via purchase.
The purchasing of audiobooks was introduced by Spotify in November last year, and among those available, quite a few are from Australian authors.
The push towards audiobooks comes as other streaming services are pulling back on podcasts. Just last week, Google revealed it would be killing its podcasting app, and integrating it with YouTube Music.
Spotify became one of the first platforms to bet big on podcasts, investing over $1 billion to sign deals for exclusive access to certain podcasters.
“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.”
“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,” David Kaefer continued.
Unlike podcasts audiobooks will remain completely ad free, and Spotify isn’t considering including a narrated function, where an artificially generated voice narrates previews between chapters.
The company believes this offer won’t increase competition with physical books, as it’s usually used while multi-tasking.
“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.”
“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 push for audiobooks comes after the company increased the premium subscription tier price in September.
Users who run out of monthly audiobook hours will be able to purchase top-ups in 10 hour increments. This will last for 12 months.
