Last year, Spotify took off the covers from its audiobook library for its Premium plan members in the US, UK, and Australia. It had a huge library of over 200,000 books to listen to and received a warm reception from everyone. But now Spotify is taking it up a notch with a new, dedicated plan for audiobooks only.
This new Audiobooks Access Tier gives you access to all the audiobooks in Spotify’s catalog with 15 hours of listening time and is priced at $9.99 per month. With this plan, users can also listen to music and podcasts on the platform, but with ads, same as their ad-supported free plan.
In case you don’t know, this plan is just a dollar shy of their Premium plan, which costs $10.99. The Premium plan gives you access to the same audiobook privileges in addition to ad-free music, podcasts, and offline downloads.
The Audiobooks Access Tier does not offer any advantage over what you get in the Premium plan. Which begs the question, why would anyone go for the audiobook plan anyway?
I always thought that the 15 hours per month limit was insufficient, so if the plan had included unlimited audiobook listening or at least 10 extra hours that you get with the $12.99 plan, it would have justified the price. As of now, it just seems like a clever ploy by Spotify to push its users to buy the Premium subscription.
The only major advantage you get with Spotify when it comes to audiobooks is – you have unrestricted access to all the books available on the platform, unlike its competitors who force you to purchase books separately. If you ask me, I would pick the Premium plan over this audiobook-only one unless it gets slashed down by a couple of bucks.
Do you use Spotify to listen to audiobooks? If so, what are your thoughts about this new Audiobooks Access Tier? Do share them with us in the comments below.
