Until recently, if you wanted to use Spotify for a streaming audiobook subscription, you had to be on their premium plan costing $10.99/month. That premium plan, which includes everything Spotify offers, offers 15 free hours of audiobook listening, with the ability to purchase additional hours.
Now, Spotify has added a stand-alone audiobooks access tier; it costs $9.99/month and offers 15 hours of monthly listening time from their catalog of 200,000 titles. If those $9.99 users want to listen to music or podcasts on Spotify, they can do so, of course, but the experience will include ads.
No one expects this added plan to significantly shift the balance of power in the audiobook market, especially since so many books exceed 15 hours of listening time, but as always, we’ll wait and see. For more background on Spotify’s entry into the audiobook subscription market, see our analysis from last month.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
