Spotify has launched a new standalone subscription service in the US for people who only want to listen to audiobooks, the aptly named Audiobooks Access Tier.
For $9.99 per month you get 15 hours of listening time for a catalog of more than 200,000 Spotify audiobooks. These include notable series such as A song of ice and fire from George RR Martin to standalone titles such as The Khan by Saima Mir. Music and podcasts can still be listened to, according to the announcement. However, they will maintain commercial breaks. Those ads don’t disappear. To get rid of them, you will have to purchase a separate one Spotify Premium subscription for $11 per month.
Pay for a subscription
What’s interesting about the level is that it doesn’t seem like you can log into the Spotify app on mobile or desktop. We checked them both and it wasn’t in either of them. Instead, you’ll need to go to a separate audiobook page the company website. If you scroll down about halfway, you will find the subscription button. There is no free trial period. Once you purchase the subscription, you’re in it until you cancel.
It’s a little strange that you don’t have a more direct way to subscribe to the app, although Spotify says this is for good reason. A company representative told us that by doing it this way, they can avoid passing on App Store fees to users. If you don’t know, Spotify support for App Store subscriptions has been discontinued in 2016. Last year they even booted older subscribers.
It seems that if the platform had let iOS users buy directly through the app, they would have had to force people to pay the Apple tax. And to make it fair for everyone, Android owners will have to go through the same process – at least that’s how we understand it. In our opinion, their explanation leaves out many important details.
Missing details
As you can guess, we have several questions, such as: is there a way to increase listening hours? 15 hours may be okay for the casual listener, but that may be too short for the power user. The Premium plan does offer a way to add an additional 10 hours of listening time for $9.99, but this is not available on Audiobooks Access Tier.
The elephant in the room here, of course, is that we still don’t have Spotify Supremium, which is supposed to deliver lossless audio streaming. There were some rumors pointing to an upcoming September 2023 launch, but it’s now March 2024 and people are still waiting.
That’s why we reached out to the platform to ask for more details and whether they have plans to roll out Audiobooks Access Tier to other countries. This story will be updated at a later date.
You can’t listen to audiobooks without a good pair of headphones. For recommendations, check out Ny Breaking’s list of the best headphones for 2024.