Free access to Spotify audiobooks is now available to Premium subscribers in the US. The new perk first launched last month in the UK and Australia …
Access is limited to 15 hours of listening per month, which is typically – but not always – enough to listen to one book per month.
Spotify audiobooks
Spotify first moved into the audiobook field in 2020, with just a few public domain titles. More titles were added in 2021, but the company’s interest only took a serious turn when it acquired audiobook platform Findaway last year.
That gave it 300K titles, but no clear unique selling point. Pricing was on par with market leader Audible, and there were no discounts for paying subscribers.
In October, Spotify announced that Premium subscribers would get 15 hours of monthly listening time – but only in Australia and the UK at launch.
Free listening now available in the US
The company has announced that the feature is now available to US Premium subscribers.
Listeners will have access to 15 hours of monthly listening time, from a catalog that now includes more than 200,000 audiobooks as part of their existing Premium subscription. This expanded catalog of books – including coveted new releases like Britney Spears’ The Woman in Me and Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend – has something for everyone, all now included in the Spotify Premium experience listeners already love.
- The Spotify Premium audiobook catalog includes over 70% of bestselling titles, including books from all of the big five publishers and many independent publishers and authors. These span genres–from romance to science fiction–and include beloved classics like Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as well as modern sensations like Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us.
- Find audiobooks in the Home feed of the Spotify app or by searching for your favorite books – and for those not sure where to start, an editorially curated selection of popular titles is available in Spotify’s audiobooks hub.
- Once you select the audiobook you want to listen to, just hit play! You can track your listening hours in the settings of your Spotify app.
- Learn more about our new audiobooks model and the UK and Australia launch here.
We noted before that, in addition to the 30% of bestsellers not included in the catalog, that 15-hour limit won’t be enough for some books – especially in the fantasy, biography, and history genres.
A Spotify survey found that audiobooks are most popular with 18-34 year olds, with more than two-thirds of Gen Z and Millennials listening to them.
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