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By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
Spotify’s ‘Audiobooks Plus’ Offer
As Spotify continues expanding its offer of audiobooks in various ways, it has announced today (August 5), that for United States subscribers, it’s rolling out the offer to buy an extra 15 hours of listening time per month if you’re at the right level of subscription.
Along with the expansion of the company’s audiobook inventory has come a steady expansion of branding.
As you may remember, to get an automatic 15 hours of listening time per month, you must be a Premium individual subscriber or a Family and Duo plan manager.
- What’s called Audiobooks Plus is an add-on, allowing Premium-level members and Family and Duo managers to buy an additional 15 hours of audiobook listening.
- There is also an Audiobooks Plus for Plan Members that lets additional members (beyond managers) who are on those Family and Duo subscriptions buy 15 hours. In such an instance, the plan member needs to request audiobook access from his or her plan manager, who can then purchase the add-on for that family or duo member for them. There’s an extra availability for these members, too (the non-manager family and duo folks) — they can get a 10-hour top-up “if they run out of time before their monthly billing cycle refreshes.”
While the pricing for an Audiobooks Plus add-on varies from market to market, in the States one of these “recurring add-ons” costs US$11.99.
All of this has been tested in Australia, New Zealand, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, Austria, and the United Kingdom. Its introduction to the States on August 5 was actually announced in an earlier memo, and the arrival of these new offers to buy extra listening hours is referred to as “extra optionality.”
Perhaps the most intriguing note in this recent news messaging is that while considering other ways to “enhance the Spotify experience for book fans,” there’s a note that this includes “testing direct sales for the listeners who want even more.” No time frame is offered on the dangled “direct sales” mention.
Initial press reactions to the Audiobooks Plus news are mixed.
Jess Weatherbed at The Verge writes that 30 hours—which a user can have by adding the newly offered 15 hours to the existing 15 hours—”won’t get you through titles like George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones or Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings.”
On the other hand, Weatherbed writes, “The main perk here is convenience — these rolling add-on subscriptions will automatically allow Premium users to listen to 30 hours of audiobooks each month without needing to buy top-ups.”
Sarah Perez notes at Techcrunch, “The news of the new subscription follows Spotify’s announcement on Monday that its subscription prices are increasing from €10,99 to €11,99 (US$12.57 to US$11:86) across markets in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Latin America, and the Asia-Pacific region.”
And in the States, the most recent StatShot reports from the Association of American Publishers (AAP) gave industry audio fans a pause in April, when—as StatShot authors wrote, “The growth trend of digital audio ended [in April], decreasing 12.5 percent year over year; however, it has increased 1.2 percent year-to-date.”
Nevertheless, the May StatShot report showed a recovery for digital audio to its usual level of viability, representing 11.4 percent of total net for the trade in May, and coming in at US$84.1 million in revenue.
Image: Spotify
More from Publishing Perspectives on audio in international publishing is here, more on Spotify and its foray into audiobook streaming is here, and more on industry statistics is here.