Spotify: after podcasts, free audiobooks are now the focus

Spotify wants to bring audiobooks to its subscribers, it has announced to investors. After music and then podcasts, they are the new focus of the company. Audiobooks will partly be available for free, but there will also be an extra subscription.

Spotify audiobooks

Spotify is a streaming service that we associate with music, but in recent times the company has gone out of its way to make podcasts successful in its app as well. Audiobooks should be the next feat that CEO Daniel Ek make clear to investors, according to a blog post.

The CEO says that audiobooks currently only account for 10 percent of the global book market. That’s because they don’t do very well in emerging markets, but in saturated markets they currently have a 50 percent share, Ek says. So there is growth potential, Spotify CEO concludes: “And as we have done with podcasts, expect us to play to win,” he sounds combative.

Free audiobooks

Spotify wants to offer some of the audiobooks for free in its app and that is financed by advertisements. In addition, there will also be a separate subscription that gives access to all books: a strategy similar to that for podcasts.

Spotify users may have already discovered that the app already contains audiobooks today, but these are currently still considered music tracks. It’s not yet clear when Spotify’s improvements for audiobooks will come. The company is counting on the acquisition of Findaway, a distributor of audio books. However, that acquisition has not yet been approved by the American trade watchdog.

If Spotify really takes a big step in the audiobook market, it will automatically become a competitor of companies such as Storytel, Rakuten Kobo and Amazon’s Audible. We recently wrote on Androidworld about the best holiday apps for Android Auto and we also discussed apps for audiobooks. What do you think, would you like to discover audiobooks in Spotify? Let us know in the comments.

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