Premium subscribers will soon get 15 hours of audiobook listening.
At a company event this afternoon, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek announced that Spotify subscribers in the UK, Australia, and, in the winter, the US will be able to stream 15 hours of premium audiobooks each month. It’s a big leap from Spotify’s initial a la carte audiobook model and has the potential to introduce millions of new listeners to the medium.This iteration of Spotify’s audiobook business has been two years in the making.
The other thing to note is that the library is not as comprehensive as Audible’s. Standard Audible subscribers can access any audiobook available on the platform, whereas Spotify specifically indicates which titles are available on premium. I have not been able to view the library yet, but I would imagine that some of the super-premium titles could be excluded. Those, however, would still be available for purchase using the a la carte system.
I did a freelance gig for a seminary, where I was cutting sort of a highlight reel from this workshop that the seminary put on that was actually about preaching. There are still living ministers from the Civil Rights Movement, and [the workshop] was for young ministers. It was basically like, “This is how you make a good sermon. This is where you put the metaphor.” The really brass tacks. I’m just having to listen to this a zillion times, and I thought, “This is such rich audio.
Front and center for me was always formal considerations and thinking about how people are used to listening. How are we trained to consume this media? There’s a real conscientiousness on my part to try to meet people halfway — because most people don’t know what an audio drama is. You try to describe it, like, well, it’s like a podcast. It’s this, and it’s that.
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