There are signs that a new major player is coming to the audiobook market: Spotify. Spotify has offered a selection of audiobooks on its subscription music service for the past couple of years, but it hasn’t drawn much attention to them. Yet Spotify has been recruiting for a head of audiobooks, whose job will be to “develop and execute the book strategy for Spotify.” A big move into audiobooks makes a lot of sense for Spotify, and it should be good for the audiobook market in general.
The music streaming giant is poised to enter the audiobook market
Sep 25, 2020
Music through apps other than Spotify - AA still opens Spotify Hi, what commands have you found actually work well to get AA (Google Assistant) to play music through apps other than Spotify? While Google Music is gone, I found that even if I tell AA to play something through another app, it still opens Spotify. Another popular Spotify integration made its debut towards the end of last year and it’s none other than Google Maps. Music is an integral piece of road trips or long drives and Google knows it too, so it integrated the option to control Spotify and Google Play Music playback with its mapping app. As of November 2018 Spotify is available in 78 countries that mutually generate a collection of more than 40 million tracks. This collection is about 20% smaller than Deezer's but what compensates is so many subscribed users and such comfortable sharing features which will expose you to other people's great collections and allow you to easily.
Spotify is, of course, a dominant force in the music business, with more than 130 million paying subscribers worldwide. It’s second only to YouTube in user base for music but also has stiff competition from Apple and Amazon. In some ways, though, Spotify is in a tight corner. All of its main competitors have other revenue streams that dwarf their revenues from music services, and all of the services offer products that are fundamentally similar to one another and risk becoming commodities. Spotify also pays the bulk of its revenues to record labels and music publishers as royalties.
As evidence of Spotify’s risky position, back in 2014, Apple was preparing to launch its Spotify competitor, Apple Music. It attempted to get the major record labels to agree to let it price the service at only $5 per month instead of $10 per month. The apparent strategic reason for this move was to force Apple’s competitors to match the $5 per month price point. Apple isn’t particularly dependent on revenue from its music service, nor are Google and Amazon, but Spotify is; a move to $5 per month could have been fatal to it.
Apple’s gambit didn’t succeed. But shortly afterward, Spotify started an aggressive campaign to diversify its business—not by introducing other lines of revenue, but by integrating other types of audio content into its service. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has stated that he wants more than 20% of listening on the platform to be of nonmusical content.
Spotify’s first move in this direction was in podcasting. It has integrated podcast playing functionality into its apps, not only for listening but also for recommendations and inclusion in playlists. It has spent hundreds of millions of dollars acquiring podcast publishers and the rights to popular individual podcasts (such as TheJoe Rogan Experience), and it has been gradually making some of its podcasts exclusive to Spotify subscribers (podcasts have traditionally been available freely to all on podcast apps).
The podcasting strategy has succeeded brilliantly so far. Spotify is now the only podcast app other than Apple Podcasts with double-digit market share. As one measure of this strategy’s success, Amazon just announced a foray into podcasting through its Amazon Music app that looks quite a lot like Spotify’s.
Audiobooks are the natural next step in Spotify’s expansion to other types of audio content. Audiobooks are among the fastest-growing segments of trade book publishing. Deloitte predicted late last year that the global market will grow by 25% to $3.5 billion by the end of this year; that’s about double the music market’s recent growth before the pandemic hit.
Publishers should welcome Spotify into the market for two reasons. One is that Spotify is the only major content platform that cross-pollinates music and audiobook listening; this should increase the overall market for audiobooks.
The other is that Spotify will inject more competition into the market. And therein lies Spotify’s challenge. Subscription audiobook services are more different from one another than streaming music services are. Whereas music services all offer unlimited on-demand access to more or less the same catalog (more than 50 million music tracks) at the same price, audiobook services vary on price, catalog, access, and other features. Audible’s $15 per month plan includes several exclusive titles as well as a full catalog, but it limits access to one new title per month for “premium” titles. Kobo’s $10 per month plan gives users access to one new title per month from a comprehensive catalog. Scribd offers unlimited access to a limited catalog of audiobooks (only three of the Big Five participate) bundled in with its $9 per month plan for e-books, magazines, and documents.
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Spotify will undoubtedly want to continue to bundle audiobooks into its main $10 per month premium subscription plan, along with podcasts. But it will be challenging for the company to get licenses to some titles for that type of offering, particularly frontlist titles from major publishers. Spotify may have to choose either a bigger catalog of audiobooks with higher or more complex pricing or a smaller catalog bundled into its main plan.
It will be fascinating to see how Spotify approaches this market. It has already taken its job posting for head of audiobooks off its website, so there may be movement from Spotify in audiobooks soon. Free spotify music app.
Another spotify free trial. Bill Rosenblatt is president of GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies and is a founding partner of Publishing Technology Partners.
A version of this article appeared in the 09/28/2020 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Spotify Eyes Audiobooks
Spotify.com is a popular tool for discovering new music to listen to. It’s free to sign up for and use, and you can take it with you on your tablet computer or smart phone. You can build a collection of songs that you like (and/or own) and organize them into playlists, or let Spotify find new music for you based on genres, artists, or songs that you already like. You can also network with your friends and favourite bands on Spotify, and check in on each other’s latest musical endeavour.
However, Spotify’s functionality is limited unless you sign up for a paid subscription; you’ll have to listen to commercials between songs, and you can’t listen to your music offline. Spotify also no longer allows for the purchase and download of songs that you hear on Spotify, meaning that you can no longer play music from Spotify on a different media player or move it to another device.
If Spotify is just not the hot spot for music for you, there are plenty of sites like Spotify out there that you can try instead. Here are six that get mentioned on the Internet frequently.
1. Pandora
(www.pandora.com)
One of the most popular websites like Spotify, Pandora focuses heavily on discovery of music. It allows you to create custom radio stations based on songs or artists that you like, and it allows 100 as opposed to Spotify’s 20! The downside is that your options for listening to songs on demand are limited, and a free account only lets you skips songs every so often, and causes advertisements to play between songs. Its monthly subscription rate is cheaper than that of Spotify, though, at $5 per month instead of $10. Pandora is currently only available in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, because of concerns over copyright and music licensing.
2. Deezer
(www.deezer.com)
A French-based music streaming service, Deezer is another popular Spotify alternative. Deezer allows you to listen to songs on-demand from a large library, and create custom playlists based on your favourites (you can even rate playlists, too). It also has a “radio stations” function, where you can listen to mixes based on songs or artists, or use the “Flow” or “Hear This” functions to create your own based on music in your collection or that you’ve listened to recently. Deezer is free to use, but you’ll need a paid subscription to play songs without advertisements in between, or play music offline on your mobile device.
3. Google Play Music
(play.google.com/music)
Building an android app with spotify embedded. In addition to being an alternative to Spotify, Google Play Music also allows you to store music that you already have (up to 50,000 songs!) on the Internet, so that you can access it from anywhere. This feature is free, but the streaming service — and the ability to create custom radio stations — requires a $10 monthly subscription. On the bright side, you are allowed to purchase and download music onto your computer from Google Play Music, something that you can’t do on Spotify.
4. Tidal
(www.tidal.com)
One of the newest Spotify competitors, Tidal is owned by rapper Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter and several like-minded artists. One of the major motivations behind it was to create a music-streaming service that resulted in more royalty money being given directly to artists themselves, instead of record labels and other music distribution middlemen. Tidal’s other main draw is that it offers a library of 25 million songs in high-quality audio, as well as over 75,000 high-definition music videos (including some exclusive content). However, Tidal has no free options (besides free trials of its services), and subscriptions are pricey (usually between $10 and $20 per month).
5. iTunes
(www.apple.com/itunes)
While it’s not exactly a music streaming service like Spotify, iTunes does let you listen to certain Internet radio stations free of charge. It also allows you to purchase and download the music that you listen to — something that Spotify doesn’t do — and organize it into playlists, move it to other devices, and so on. You can also do this with certain movies and TV show episodes. Again, unlike Spotify, you don’t pay for subscriptions on iTunes; you just pay for each song, album, playlist, movie, or TV show episode/season that you want to watch.
6. Apple Music
(www.apple.com/music)
Apple Music is basically Apple’s competitor to Spotify. It features a vast library of songs that you can listen to commercial-free, and sort into playlists or custom radio stations based on your preferences. Apple Music also has pre-made radio stations curated by celebrity DJs and musical artists that you can listen to, as well as the “Connect” feature where you can get an exclusive look at what your favourite singers and bands are up to. Apple Music costs about $10 per month (or $15 for a family-wide subscription), though you can get a three-month free trial of it.
Have you used any of these services similar to Spotify? Were they music to your ears, or just a bunch of white noise? Have you gotten in tune with any other potential alternatives to Spotify that we should know about? Let us know in the comments below.
Also, if one of these websites or apps strikes a chord with you, and you want to use it in place of Spotify, our last tutorial will show you how to delete your Spotify account.
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