The audiobook market remains in its double-digit-growth phase and is now edging out ebooks in sales volume for traditional publishers. Despite this growth, audiobooks remain complicated to access, with a distinct lack of choice in the market, according to industry insiders. At a FutureBook discussion in late November, Videl Bar-Kar of Bookwire (a German distributor) talked about the future of the audiobook market with Nir Zicherman, global head of audio and gated content at Spotify; Michele Cobb, executive director of the Audio Publishers Association (APA); and Nathan Hull, chief strategy officer at Beat Technology.
Convenience, choice, and discoverability are the three critical factors in growing the audiobook market, said Spotify’s Zicherman. Right now, there are more podcast listeners than audiobook listeners, and there are many more readers in the world than audiobook listeners. Why is that? “It’s not convenient to listen to audiobooks,” Zicherman said. “And [consumers] don’t have a lot of choice.” In some markets, consumers have only one option for how to listen to an audiobook, which hurts publishers and authors alike. Spotify entered the audiobook market earlier this year, starting with à la carte sales, and seeks to remedy these market problems.
Spotify isn’t focused on taking a share of existing sales; they’re targeting casual listeners and people who have never listened to audiobooks. Spotify reaches nearly a half billion people who consume all types of audio content, both spoken word and music. “That’s a pretty big pond to fish from when you think about the potential to convert new users,” Zicherman said. “I don’t think the opportunity here is carving out a piece of the pie. The opportunity is to grow the pie substantially.”
Spotify already has experience in introducing its users to new forms of audio content. It started in 2006 as a music-only service, then introduced podcasts in 2015 via programmatic or editorial recommendations and cross-promotion of content. “The transition from music to podcasting was a very, very large chasm that we had to bridge, but we introduced many new listeners to the format than have ever existed before. The chasm that we have to cross from podcasts to audiobooks is substantially smaller.” Bar-Kar agreed and said that when you read all the growth reports about audio, they project 15 percent growth for the next five or six years. Getting there, he said, is not about going after the same listeners as before.
Not all casual listeners are alike, and they can’t be treated the same—and new business models must emerge as a result. Zicherman said consumers want to pay for content in different ways and listen at different times, at different frequencies, etc. In the Anglophone market especially, credit-based systems like Audible predominate, effectively pricing everything in the market exactly the same. (Not to mention the fact that the biggest publisher, Penguin Random House, doesn’t make its catalog available at all in unlimited subscription services like Storytel and Scribd.) Many types of content are disadvantaged in a credit-based system if a book isn’t seen as worth a credit. It penalizes shorter books and children’s books, as well as books that are older. While existing business models might work for avid audiobook consumers, they’re limiting for casual listeners. Spotify envisions a “buffet of options” for the average consumer as well as the publisher. “On the publisher’s side, they will have a variety of options for how to distribute content on Spotify and, I hope, throughout the rest of the industry,” Zicherman said, expressing the hope that other services will also offer consumers more options in audiobook listening.
Cobb added that it’s challenging to grow the audio market when data about listening is held by retailers. “Content providers are making content, but we don’t necessarily know what time of day it’s being listened to or where it’s being listened to,” she said, acknowledging that some retailers are also publishers and do have access to such insights (hello, Amazon). If publishers had the data, they might gain more specific ideas about content creation and perform even better.
Regardless, publishers ought to be experimenting more often, given what we do know about audio consumption, which tends to happen in small chunks during morning and evening commutes, said Hull. Yet publishers still focus on mirroring the book and producing a product that’s nine or 12 hours long. “Why are people not acting more upon the activities of the listener?” As a good model to follow, he held up Norway’s Jo Nesbø, one of the most successful contemporary novelists today, who writes serialized audio-first publications with his publishers and also on his own. “It bewilders me that this isn’t happening more with book publishers. … You have those direct relationships with agents and authors. Show a little bit more creativity. Just experiment and learn.”
Zicherman agreed and said, “If you look across every other medium on the internet, no medium has reached its true potential as long as it continued to piggyback off of another format. So for the medium to reach its true potential, you need to create content that is native to that medium.” Cobb said Pushkin, founded by Malcolm Gladwell, is a good example of this native approach.
Bottom line: Spotify’s Zicherman believes audiobooks today are comparable to the podcast industry in 2015. Seven years ago, podcasts were perceived as having reached their true potential, but today there are 15 to 20 times as many podcasts and 2 to 3 times more people across the world listening to them on a regular basis. Zicherman said that all podcasts sounded the same until Serial came along and changed everything. Audiobooks await the same moment. “You want to place a lot of bets across the entire industry and make it easy to create and easy to distribute and easy to get content discovered so that the next Serial can happen in the book space. When it happens, it’s not going to lead to marginal growth on top of what we’re already seeing. It’s going to be an inflection point.”
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.
