Music streaming giant Spotify has revealed that it’s intending to make a big splash in the audiobooks business.
At the company’s Investor Day 2022, CEO Daniel Ek revealed that the company would be branching out into audiobooks following its successful music and podcast offerings.
Several months ago, Spotify announced its agreement to acquire audiobook distribution platform Findaway, which was a surefire indicator that it was thinking big in this area. Whie that deal has yet to close, Ek has confirmed that he sees audiobooks as “a massive opportunity”.
The overall book market today is worth $140 billion, yet audiobooks only represent 6 to 7% of that. In the most developed audiobook markets that figure is closer to 50%, so Spotify as seeing this as a potential $70 billion market that it’s going to compete with Amazon and its Audible platform for.
Ek also spoke about his intention to make Spotify’s audiobook offering favourable to creators, which would seem to tie in with the Findaway Voices service that puts authors together with voice actors.
Spotify revealed that it’s planning to relaunch the audiobook arm of its streaming service later this year. As this suggests, you can already access audiobooks through Spotify, but it’s not a particularly well fleshed out offering, and it’s not easily accessible.
No specifics were mentioned on the pricing of this audiobook offering. Will it form part of an expanded subscription tier, or will you be able to buy your audiobooks outright in the traditional manner? Hopefully we’ll find out more soon.
