Spotify Wants Non-English Audiobooks Badly Enough To Sink Over $1M Into It
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Summary
- Spotify is investing €1 million in audiobooks in regional languages, starting with French and Dutch, to increase non-English content on its platform.
- With over 200,000 audiobooks available and a $10 Audiobooks Access Tier, Spotify undercuts Audible on pricing, though it puts a cap on listening hours.
- Spotify is expanding its audiobook catalog to compete with Audible and has started using AI for narration, giving voice artists the short end of the stick.
If you still aren’t aware, Spotify has found a new fad beyond music and podcasts — audiobooks. Launched a couple of years ago, audiobooks are the latest way to consume audio content on the Spotify app. While Spotify undercuts Audible on price, it still lags in catalog size. To fix that, it’s now spending its own money to create more audiobooks in regional languages.
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Spotify has made audiobooks available in several countries, including the US, where Audible holds a sizable chunk of the market. Now, Spotify is eyeing niche segments within the audiobook space where the format is still growing — and one of those segments is regional languages. The company wants to help publishers and authors make their books available in more non-English languages, starting with French and Dutch. To support this, Spotify has announced a €1 million (~$1.13 million) investment.
France and the Netherlands are of particular interest because of their low audiobook adoption rates. Out of 750,000 French titles, only 20,000 are available in audio format. For Dutch, the number is just 15,000 out of 209,000 physical books.
While Spotify continues to stress “the power of human narration” in creating audiobooks, it has also started using AI for narration quite recently. Its partnership with ElevenLabs is aimed at improving affordability and accessibility. But beyond straying from Spotify’s earlier stance, the use of AI also casts a shadow over professional narrators and voice artists, who risk being cut out of the process entirely. Spotify didn’t make it clear whether it will use this new investment towards AI audiobook generation or not.
Source: Spotify
How do you access audiobooks on Spotify?
Over the past year, Spotify has steadily added more audiobooks to its catalog. From a few thousand titles at launch, it now offers over 200,000 for you to explore. About a year ago, it introduced a dedicated Audiobooks Access Tier for $10 per month in the US, which gives users 15 hours of listening time — compared to Audible’s $15 for unlimited listening, even to its premium content.
If you want to bundle audiobooks with your regular music subscription, just add another dollar — for $11 per month, you get access to everything. It’s Spotify’s way of nudging users toward its Premium plan by pricing the two tiers so close together.
