38
votes
Spotify has added audiobooks to its subscription model – reaching millions of people, it may revolutionise the already booming audiobooks business
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- Why Spotify is betting big on the booming audiobooks industry
- Authors
- Alex Christian
- Word count
- 1136 words
I've used this a bit as Brandon Sanderson has decided to move his latest projects away from Audible. He wants to help spur competition in hopes that Audible pays authors better. Not for himself, since he's super successful, but for smaller authors who don't get much.
The interface is pretty good. The book is essentially a playlist of chapters. Which i suppose the same can be said for Audible, but it feels different since Spotify is mainly for music. It's cool that it's included in the premium plan, since I already subscribe. If a lot of authors start making the move, I may consider canceling my Audible monthly.
But will Spotify pay authors better? Musicians are already getting paid very little and if this is included in the same subscription plan, there won't be much more money left to pay out.
Here's a bit of inside baseball on this topic: Spotify announced their included audiobook-hours perk while quietly telling authors that they'd get compensated on a similar model to how musicians are paid. AKA, extremely poorly, via a divvied-up a pool of money via some opaque streaming calculation.
To go back further, Spotify bought the only competitor to Audible (Findaway voices), in a move that seemed designed to bolster their streaming content, although they downplayed the streaming angle to authors and narrators at first.
The writing was on the wall when Spotify quickly shut down the "Authors Direct" service that Findaway voices offered. It had allowed authors to sell audiobooks directly to readers via mini storefronts for a modest percentage of the sale. They also shut down the Authors Direct app, essentially cutting readers off from the books they'd purchased. Authors were encouraged to distribute through the Spotify catalog instead.
Then, a clause buried deeply in the Findaway Voices TOS seized permission to use narrator voices to train AI, even though in many cases the narrators weren't a party to the contract and didn't give consent. SAG-AFTRA had to send in the lawyers.
Sanderson made a deal with Spotify for an undisclosed amount that he was happy with. I'm glad he was able to do this, but he's a powerhouse and these deals are a rarity. Sanderson was right about Audible, but unfortunately Spotify isn't much better for an average author. And Audible and Spotify are essentially the only two games in town. You can't even get your audiobook in other stores (like Barnes and Noble, Folio.fm) without going through Findaway or Audible as a middleman.
TL;DR: They both stink. Sorry.
Source: I'm an author.
Maybe not, but if Audible sees a significant drop in sales, then maybe they'll pay better. At the very least the author might get a little more cash from users on Spotify who don't use Audible.
But I still have to pay $40 per audiobook? I'm a huge Brandon Sanderson fan, but that's a huge expense and probably means I'm not going to listen to anymore of his works on audiobook
Tbf the narrators and editors still need to be paid. Plus some of his books are very long. But I have subscriptions, so I don't know how that price compares to similar audiobooks
I just checked in Spotify (I'm in the US, if that matters), and one of his recent releases (Yumi and the Nightmare Painter) is $14.99, which lines up with the price point he talked about setting for his Kickstarter works in his announcement that he would not be offering them on Audible. He said he was aiming for that price point since it's what a monthly subscription to Audible costs, and he thinks it's a fair price. Meanwhile The Way of Kings is $38.90, but he didn't get to set that rate from my understanding, since that book wasn't self-published. Not sure what the future will hold with his regular works vis-à-vis Audible, though I bet they'll continue to be available there since I don't see Tor taking a stand against them any time soon.
As a consumer of audiobooks, this has appeal. But I'd worry this does for audiobooks what they did for music, which would basically kill all tangible revenue for the authors/actors.
Although, my last three audiobooks clocked in over 20 hours apiece....15 hours isn't that much.
Edit: At the end of the day, I get a much better deal from my library (though admittedly they're suffering their own problems from DRM killing ownership).
Spotify isn't even profitable as-is, so we can expect even more screwing over of artists, along with lots of enshittification and price hikes as they begin to realize that music streaming has likely hit market saturation.
All the money comes from customers. If there are no profit margins and they can't get more customers, increasing prices is a prerequisite for paying authors more.
If authors are being "screwed over" then it's because customers aren't paying enough. Customers and authors aren't on the same side when it comes to setting prices.
I agree, which is why I'm not so offended when prices go up for services that are otherwise unsustainable. I often avoid getting roped into them altogether if I think the deal is too good to be true (i.e. MoviePass).
I personally don't use streaming music, because for the money they would actually need to charge to make it sustainable, I'd rather just buy whole albums from bandcamp or qobuz. Not to mention their desktop players are all garbage next to foobar2000.
That's a funny thing to draw a line on because the way I saw it, the only people who lost in MoviePass was the investors, and I'm kinda okay with that. I paid 10 bucks a month, movie theatres got money for the ticket, and I watched a movie a week basically. When it started dropping being crazy I just cancelled.
It's because I see these tactics through the lens of someone who watched walmart and then amazon destroy retail. I think running your business at massive losses for years as a way to destroy existing competitors and prevent new ones from springing up should be illegal. If I as a consumer participate in that racket then it feels like I am offering it my tacit endorsement.
If I had realized that the only reason Amazon was so awesome in 2009 was because they were burning money like there was no tomorrow, and that a bunch of my other favorite online retailers would end up closing or turning shitty to try and keep up, I might have shopped online a little differently.
In the context of Moviepass in, what was it, 2018, that initial offering was so absurd that I don't think there was a snowball's chance in hell of it turning into market dominance. Everybody was talking about how they would inevitably fail, and they basically did. They're back in name only, and now the theaters have brought out competing services that're actually sustainable.
MoviePass might be a bad example, since they started with prices so low that they bankrupted themselves almost instantly, but the basic plan was still there which is why I didn't trust them.
100% on the same page there. They were definitely trying for the same strategy, but it just doesn't make sense. People like going to movies, they don't appreciate the concept of being able to go in and of itself. There's always going to be a slim number who are happy to just let the fee hit them monthly, but the $10 figure worked for Netflix et al because it doesn't cost very much to stream a twenty year old TV show, a comparable price for "unlimited in-theatre viewings!" would be something like $50 at least, and there aren't many people who would let that accrue thoughtlessly.
I get that. It's just hard to see how Moviepass would have ever made money at 10 dollars a subscription, paying for 16 dollar tickets. If it went fishy I feel like there would definitely be more alarms but I just liked seeing movies subsidized by bad investors.
They wouldn't have. Their plan was to gain enough market share that exhibitors would have been forced to sell them tickets at a discount, while eventually raising their own prices to a point of profitability.
The problem with their plan was twofold, however.
They started with pricing too low and bankrupted themselves before reaching a market share necessary to start pressuring other players.
They were trying to inject themselves as yet another middleman. There was never any reason a theater chain couldn't run its own subscription service without introducing another party looking for their cut, and that is exactly what we've seen happen.
They may have tripped and fallen flat on their face at the starting line, but they were still trying to play by the same old (and evil) silicon valley playbook.
funnily enough, I think they actually started at a "reasonable" price, (is $100 a month really reasonable lol), for some reason they just went down to $10 in a couple of months or whatever.
Spotify only keeps 30% of their revenue. It definitely is simple supply and demand: there's more music out there then ever, which is wonderful. There's a finite pool of subscription money (which is soaked up by the likes of Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny, who I believe were the highest grossing recording artists last year) and finite human attention. More songs, which is objectively a good thing, simply lowers the value of the songs.
As a consumer, I don't want Spotify subscription costs to go up, because it's not in my interest. It's in our best interest to get the best deal for ourselves, and nobody owes artists an economic cartel.
As a small hobbyist musician with no designs of ever making money, I don't care about making pocket change that doesn't even cover distributor (e.g. LANDR, DistroKid) costs either. Professionals will continue to make money from touring and sync/mechanical licenses.
For anyone looking for an audiobook alternative to the big players, consider Libro.fm. They have the same model as Audible (monthly credit subscription), only you get DRM-free titles that you can play in your own app (or theirs if you don’t want the hassle of managing things yourself).
Their selection is great. The only titles I don’t find it in are Audible exclusives (or books that simply don’t have an audiobook). You also choose a local bookstore that they share a portion of their proceeds with (how much of a portion though, I don’t know).
They’re not paying me anything to say this, by the way. I’ve just been a happy customer of theirs for years now. It feels good to not support the Audible monopoly (and by proxy Amazon).
I might try that later. I have used audible on and off (I'm a hardcopy book reader mainly), not comfortable it being run by amazon. And now I find Spotify trying their hand at audio books ( I only ever used them for hard to find music I couldn't buy in CD form - of which there is a ton)... Gee whiz
More platforms need to get into the audiobook game. Amazon has unfairly monopolized the market for too long, and they'll need stiff competition to get them to lose market share. Sadly many of my favorite authors are forced to only publish on Audible because of their exclusivity clauses. I hope this changes that.
INAL but it looks like some extremely anticompetitive BS that audible is pulling. They need competition and a lawsuit.
It's kind of hard to decide what to do. I don't really like what Spotify is doing to music artists and they may get worse for audiobooks in the long run.
But I also want Amazon to have competition.
I guess the solution is to listen to both????
I love what Spotify did for artists: it democratized music distribution and enabled people to discover, curate and enjoy a more diverse array of music. The status quo before that was lucking into finding CDs (especially for international releases) or iTunes.
Artists have never made jack from music sales (only touring), and less from radio, unless they were a fraction of 1% of artists. And they were usually signed to labels that paid them pennies on the dollar. (They still are: huge artists lose something like 90% of what Spotify pays out to their labels.)
Spotify pays out the majority of their subscription take every month, split based on demand. If artists aren't making money, it's simply because not enough people are listening to them and the market has spoken. And that's fine, because more people are listening the way than ever and are trying a wider array of things. Gatekeeping labels are no longer able to play kingmaker to megastars, and there's more music than ever. (Thus, it has even less value, thanks to the principle of supply and demand.)
I was never going to be listening to Taylor Swift (who's soaking up a massive share of streaming money). I'll keep my J-Pop, niche metal, House music and 90s Eurodance. I'd rather those be accessible, and get a small amount of money, than make some big record labels more money. They're the ones beating the anti-Spotify drum, primarily for negotiating leverage. They're the reason the latest round of changes to the pooling system (minimum stream counts) is giving a larger slice of the pie to big labels.
That makes sense. I guess I don't understand enough about how any of this works.
Thank you for the reply.
Check them out from libraries. If they don't have one you want, fill out a request form. They often get approved
I usually already do! I usually check libby first before I buy any audiobook I might want.
I've pirates some Audible books because Audible is ridiculously expensive in my country. Maybe it's the kind of book I seek, but the audio quality was very low. The narration was not great either, but a lot of things sounded like it were recorded on tape in a bathroom stall in 1979. So much worse than podcasts.
Maybe I'll give them a chance on Spotify.
That could be a bad rip as well. It's a bit of a faff trying to strip DRM from Audible's files, and some uploads of relatively recently recorded books can end up with a low bitrate which makes the quality feel awful.
I don't believe that was the case. It was several books from different sources and eras, with a good bitrate. High-quality MP3 is trivial these days.
High quality MP3 is easy to encode, but you have to strip the DRM first. There’s probably a point in the process where a significant amount of quality loss occurs.
I’ve listened to hundreds of books on Audible over the past 20 years and they’ve always been extremely high quality.
I really don't understand the mechanisms in play here. How does failing to strip DRM properly result in the a lower quality but still intelligible audio stream? Sounds very analog to me. My experience with digital stuff is it works or it doesn't. I'd expect failing to strip DRM properly results in no audio stream at all.
As another poster pointed out, you can strip DRM from Audible files without having to transcode them.
Whatever source OP got them from could have stripped the DRM and then re-encoded them at a lower bit rate to make the files smaller.
This may have been true in the past, but it hasn't been true for years. In the past, .aa files were decryptable and .aax files were not. So often people/programs would download the .aa file and decrypt that to mp3. But the .aa files are lower quality. But .aax are effectively the same as .m4b files with aac audio. They can be decrypted with no quality loss by tons of different software, including stock ffmpeg.
sidenote: there is also now aaxc files. These are identical to aax files, in that they are m4b with aac audio. The only difference is that aaxc encryption has a different key for every book, and aax has the same key for all books that one user downloads. And aaxc has been decryptable for a few years now.
Maybe it depends on what book you're listening to. I've listen to audiobooks a lot and have favourite narrators. So I go for those I already know are pretty good.
I can't comment on audio quality though. I'm fine with it so far. But I'm not very discerning when it comes to audio quality. Something that sounds fine to me is not fine for someone else.
I should be fair and say that I'm not really attracted by the idea of book narrators, especially in fiction. When I read, most of the time, I don't have an internal voice, and, when I do, it is a rather non-personalized voice that is basically my own reading very fast without any emotion.
Maybe I'm just not the right audience for audiobooks.
I'm trying to get into audiobooks because I often don't have the patience to sit and read a book anymore (ADHD), but I sympathize with you about not jiving with book narrators. They really make or break my interest within the first couple of minutes. Maybe like me you just haven't found something that you're into.
I have ADHD as well. Reading is much faster than listening, which is an advantage. But I only really read, with the correct amount of attention, when I take the medication. I find that it is easy to get distracted from audiobooks.
I sympathize, I find audiobooks distracting most of the time because I can't listen to them and also concentrate on a task at the same time unless it's something like going for a walk. Music is fine, but trying to pay attention to what's being said is too much stimulation sometimes.
July: 18h 37m
Aug: 10h 13m
Sep: 16h 34m
Oct: 4h 13m (I was sick a lot that month and didn't drive or go running, which is my audiobook time)
Is Spotify still charging per audiobook? Last time I looked into them, it seemed you had to purchase them on top of already having a subscription. I ended up looking into audiobooks at my local library using Libby instead.
It's only 15 hours though, which is basically nothing if you're an avid audiobook listener.