Though Audible has a stranglehold on the rapidly expanding audiobook industry, Swedish streaming giant Spotify is making moves to muscle in on Amazon’s global monopoly.
Spotify has announced that its Premium subscribers in the UK and Australia will now receive 15 hours of complimentary access to audiobooks each month, a feature set to be introduced in the US later this year.
This initiative is part of Spotify's strategy to diversify its revenue streams, building on its existing music and podcast offerings.
Premium users will have access to a vast catalogue of over 150,000 audiobooks and can purchase additional 10-hour increments if desired.
Spotify’s diversification game
Since gaining global dominance of the streaming market in the early 2010s, Spotify has metamorphosed from being a music streamer to an all-purpose audio platform.
Podcasting has since become a central pillar of Spotify’s offering.
To get a sense of how important podcasting is to Spotify, the Swedish streaming platform purportedly paid Joe Rogan $200 million dollars for exclusive streaming rights to his hugely popular podcast The Joe Rogan Experience.
The agreement came with controversy and a debate over free speech and misinformation (Rogan is a noted anti-vaxxer, and regularly hosts infamous conspiracy theorists including Alex Jones).
But Spotify’s chief executive Daniel Ek said at the time that exclusive rights to content like Joe Rogan’s podcast were essential to compete against other tech giants like Apple and Google.
It stood to reason that Spotify would begin exploring the other major long-form audio product, audiobooks.
But the trend actually began to ferment from the music label side of the industry.
Speaking to the Acquired podcast, Ek explained how German music labels have been uploading audiobooks to Spotify for some time.
“Unbeknownst to us, one of the crazy things that ended up happening was just people started uploading audiobooks because it turns out that these music labels actually own a bunch of audiobook rights,” Ek explained.
“I think that was one realisation where we realised, hey, this platform doesn't seem to matter all that much what we're putting on it. People just like consuming content,” said Ek.
Audiobooks are one of the fastest-growing categories of audio content, according to Ek, yet discovery remains a significant roadblock to widespread adoption.
But with the line between podcast and audiobook rapidly blurring – Acquired podcasts, for instance, are essentially three-hour-plus episodes cataloguing the genesis and expansion of major tech firms – Spotify clearly sees streaming as the future for the industry.