Spotify Premium gets a great free audiobooks upgrade – here’s everything you need to know
Spotify has announced that its Premium subscribers will get a new benefit: 15 hours of audiobooks per month. You can choose from a library of 150,000 audiobooks, including huge titles from the biggest publishers, and more titles will be added “constantly,” Spotify Vice President David Kaefer said in an interview with TechRadar. The new feature will launch on October 3, 2023 in the UK and Australia, arriving in the US in “winter”.
You could already buy audiobooks to listen to on Spotify, and a very limited selection of books is available for free to all users – but this is the first time a library of books has been available as part of a Spotify subscription in the US and Major -Britain.
Premium subscribers can listen to excerpts from many books to try things out, or you can just focus on one book – no need to pick a book and commit to it.
15 hours doesn’t sound like a huge amount, but it’s enough for two shorter audiobooks or one longer audiobook. Spotify is confident this will satisfy most casual audiobook listeners, or those who haven’t listened to audiobooks much before and are just getting into it – which is exactly where the company is aiming this upgrade.
“(We’re) trying to build a product that has broad appeal, and we’re going to have people who are both super fans of audiobooks, we’re going to have casual fans, and we’re going to have people who are new. So it’s important to strike a balance there.” find,” said Kaefer, who added that reaching the 15-hour limit was based on testing to date.
“The average audiobook is seven to ten hours long, so you should be able to read one or two books without reaching the limit. We looked at employee testing behavior, as well as the way people in other countries consume audiobooks. Germany is a big fan of audiobooks… a lot of audiobooks have been available in Germany for a long time through our music feed. There just happens to be a history of that. So we had some data there… we looked at what data is available to understand the usage. We found that 15 (hours) was generous, and that people could probably listen to what they wanted within that time.”
If you run out of time, you can top up another 10 hours of listening for $9.99 / £9.99 / AU$11.99. These 10 hours don’t run out at the end of the month – they last until you use them, as long as you use them within a year. However, your normal 15 hours will not carry over to the next month if you do not use them.
I asked if there was an option for a level where someone pays a higher additional amount per month and he/she can use “all you can eat” within the library of 150,000 books.
“Maybe,” Kaefer says, in a tone that implies more than this has not yet been decided, rather than avoiding a strong answer. “I think what’s going to be really fascinating is that as we get started with this, we’re going to learn a lot. We’re going to learn what books people are interested in, we’re going to learn how often they’re interested.”
Exploring the library
Spotify says the catalog will include big-name titles from the biggest publishers, including HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Penguin Random House, the latter of which has not previously participated in this type of promotion, according to Spotify. The company gave us a sample of titles available to show the breadth of what will be:
- Richard Osman, The bullet that missed
- Matthew Perry, Friends, lovers and the big terrible
- Jennette McCurdy, I’m glad my mother died
- JRR Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring: Lord of the Rings
- Robert Galbraith, The Inky Heart: Cormoran Strike, Book 6
- Bob Mortimer, The Satsuma Complex
- Mirjam Margolyes, This is true
- Stefan Koning, Fairy tale
- Bono, Surrender: 40 issues, one story
- Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens
As I mentioned earlier, Spotify says new titles will be continually added to its roughly 150,000-strong library, but titles will also disappear from it. Like Netflix or Prime Video, there will be some rotation in and out.
“Some of that is necessary,” Kaefer explains. “Sometimes a publisher loses the rights to distribute a particular book, and sometimes it could be because it’s not popular, or because we don’t have an agreement with a particular publisher. But we expect there will be a lot of stability in the catalog in general.”
This can obviously lead to situations where someone is going through a book when it leaves the service, and Spotify is aware that this is an issue that needs to be resolved.
“Our goal is that someone doesn’t end up in a situation where someone starts a book and can’t finish it,” Kaefer says. Spotify will take some actions, such as not heavily promoting or recommending titles that it knows will disappear soon, but it will look for other ways to warn people to hurry if they’re halfway through something. Kaefer didn’t provide details, but he added: “You’ve seen Netflix, we will invest in such an experience.”
Winter is coming
As I said, while this is coming to the UK and Australia immediately, the US release date is vague, with the company currently just saying ‘winter’.
“We’re excited to bring it to the UK first because it’s a market that has traditionally been a market that likes to test and is an early adopter of things. And we’ll learn and we’ll evolve as we always do,” says Kaefer.
“We may make some adjustments (based on reception in the US and Australia), but the core of the proposal is set. Like everything, we will be working with book publishers from day one, (working out) how we can create editorial playlists making and book recommendations, well… we’ll make sure any issues are resolved, and we’ll go wider in the US later this winter.”
Kaefer says the lack of a firmer date for the US is due to “the vagaries and tedious details of tech rollout.” During the announcement event, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said more countries will follow suit.
Read between the lines
It’s worth noting that shortly after code was found in the Spotify app indicating that a high-resolution HiFi music level might finally be coming, Spotify held a big event to announce the latest feature and still no music can be found in high resolution.
Now, I’m not as sure as our Senior Editor Al Griffin that Spotify HiFi is never coming, but at this point it seems clear that this isn’t Spotify’s priority.
It seems like Spotify wants to continue growing by making itself more attractive to people outside of music. We all know that it has a huge category of songs, but so do all the other best music streaming services. It focuses on audio stuff you can’t get on other services, which has brought exclusive podcasts (or ad-free podcasts), and now it also means wider, easier access to audiobooks. Instead of paying Apple Music and Audible for your different interests, Spotify hopes you’ll just pay a monthly fee for both.
It also means that you will be less likely to want to leave Spotify for another platform, according to Daniel Ek.
This seems great, many Spotify users at the TechRadar office are very happy with this change. But it doesn’t help those holding their breath for hi-res audio.