Four years ago, Apple Music took over Spotify as the leading top paid music service in the United States. That’s when Spotify decided that they wanted to add podcasts to their app. Now that they have already done that, they have decided to acquire audiobooks on their app since it is a medium that’s on the rise.
They plan to start this service in Australia and Britain for subscribers to be able to enjoy up to 15 hours of audiobook streaming each month as part of their services. With this addition, Spotify has the opportunity to change the main audio book platform that is currently held by Amazon’s Audible audiobooks. They have been dominating the Audiobook market for years and spotty now has the opportunity to dethrone them in the coming years.
Spotify currently has 220 million Premium paying members worldwide. This gives opportunities to publishers to reach a newer audience they didn’t think of before. Spotify will create audio book recommendations based off demographics, and based off of music and podcasts listen too.
One issue that Spotify is going to run into is knowing how to charge consumers, and publishers getting paid. On many other audio book services they charge per book to buy. but with Spotify being a monthly subscription they are talking about users getting the free 15 hours per month and Spotify would pay the publishers for those hours. But if someone wants to listen to more than they can pay an additional $10.99 for an extra 10 hours for that month. This will be a significant change in the audiobook industry.
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