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Spotify Premium Will Include Instant Access to 150,000+ Audiobooks (UK/AUS tomorrow, US to follow)
(newsroom.spotify.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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Technology
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They don't own the books. Even as a dominant market force in audiobooks, the best Amazon can do is one book credit a month and a small mediocre library of content they do actually own.
Spotify doesn't have the capability to get licensing that allows for unlimited access.
Seriously, people need to stop complaining about absolutely everything. It’s so tiring. This is something no one was paying for yesterday. Audible is what? $15 a month for one book?
No body was asking for it either. Now they have a reason to raise prices. And they will.
Maybe, but they have two major competitors that they need to stay around the cost of.
They do have a library of stuff they own or license, too, though I personally am not interested in much of it. It's worth mentioning that some of it involves reasonable investment with celebrity readers or more expensive production. (I can't stand any of that. A second reader for different chapters is tolerable; more is not.)
It's 36 for 3 credits after that, with occasional sales of two specific titles for one credit or discounts on cash price. I'm not sure how they structure their actual deals with publishers, but I am reasonably sure that they're leveraging their market position hard to sell some of those books at those prices, because they're way less than anywhere else including other formats.
15 hours makes the whole "we include audiobooks in your subscription" to be a pretty token service, though. That's not that much time.
There is at least one actual subscription audiobook service that is close to unlimited* and has a decent library (though it's older and less known content, and discoverability it pretty bad). I've found several series I've read 10-20 books in a row of a month through scribd. (I can provide a referral for a free trial on request. Not trying to advertise though). I'm guessing Spotify is going for high profile stuff, though, and that costs more.
*How it works is that certain publisher deals will only let you listen to a certain number from an author or in a series in a month, then you have to wait until the next month for the rest. But you can still access the rest of their library.
I have no idea about the economics of audiobooks personally, I am more of a short form reader, so when I do read a book, I bought it used for a couple bucks off eBay or from a local used book store. I am far from the target market for audiobooks.
I think the biggest issue with audiobooks is all the extra people it takes. An author does most of the work on a book, and while advances do exist, they're mostly established authors who already have a known audience. Ultimately, they make money if a book sells. Obviously printing isn't free, but it's not crazy and doesn't scale up costs that much.
An audiobook still pays the author, but it also has a bunch of extra up front costs. You need a sound studio, you need a narrator, and you need audio mastering. All of these cost good money up front, the costs scale up with length. The 45 hour Brandon Sanderson Way of Kings is going to cost a lot more to make than a short 5 hour beach read, and because of the length inherently have lower floors and ceilings on volume than something shorter. You need to charge more to the enthusiasts who want that content to offset the extra costs. I'm honestly not sure if Amazon is using those as a loss leader knowing that those readers usually read a lot of books, or if they're bullying the publishers into giving them a discount, but either way I don't think anyone else can afford it.
Yea, and podcasts usually have better production. I guess ads are that lucrative idk.
Podcasts have minimal writing and terrible production. Even the insanely well developed ones are obscenely cheaper per hour than a halfassed audiobook.
There are some scripted podcasts with more enthusiastic narration, background music, etc than some audiobooks I’ve listened to. I thought Walter Isaacson‘s recording on his Dell podcast was better than one of his books from a few years back.