Spotify’s latest gamble is a direct assault on the dominance of Audible, which is owned by Amazon. Moreover, it’s a sound diversification strategy that would put Spotify in a stronger position compared to the likes of Apple Music, Amazon Prime Music, and YouTube. But just like music labels and artists before, Spotify’s latest strategy has now also rattled writers and publishing houses, who fear that free audiobook listening will devalue their work in the same way that streaming did for music.
“The agents worry that paying publishers for the amount of time that people listen to a book could eat into lucrative à la carte payments,” says a report in The New York Times. According to Financial Times, Spotify is paying publishers in the same fashion as it does to music labels — by the number of hours a title is listened to. However, not every publisher is fully committed to Spotify’s vision.
A major concern is that earnings from hours listened per user will be far smaller compared to a person paying the full price for an audiobook. But Spotify is also taking a cautious approach by not pushing its entire audiobook library into the freemium landscape. The company introduced audiobooks to its platform with a digital shelf of over 300,000 titles late in 2022. A tussle over revenue sharing with Apple forced a quick departure from the iOS app, and now users are asked to buy audiobooks from Spotify’s web storefront.
