Spotify has officially launched Audiobooks, a potentially important add-on to its offering whose name says it all: audiobooks. It does so at the moment, yes, only in the United States and without any roadmap for its export to the rest of the territories in which it operates.
However, audiobooks arrive sooner or later on this and other sides of the pond, the news is interesting because of the gap it proposes with respect to Spotify’s traditional subscription business model. And it is that even though Audiobooks is a complement to the Spotify offer, it is not in the sense that one might expect.
Or, in other words, the more than 300,000 audiobooks available in the Audiobooks catalog cannot be enjoyed -the vast majority of them, at least- neither for free, nor by paying the current subscription to the service. On the contrary, they are there to be purchased one by one, which bookstore of a lifetime. This is, perhaps, the most curious of this novelty.
So no, Spotify’s Audiobooks is not in competition with, for example, Amazon’s Audible.
“This is just the beginning of the Spotify Audiobooks journey. We have been working to create a seamless audiobook experience, and we will continue to build and innovate on this in the future.” Therefore, all of the above could change eventually, although it does not seem that it will do so in this first stage of launch.
Spotify will see. For now, it is just another attempt to continue monopolizing users, listeners if you prefer, around a solution that covers everything: music, above all, concert ticket sales included; but also a podcast with its own monetization models and with relative results that, however, do not diminish its prominent position in the sector.
What will it be, will it be from Audiobooks, we will have to see it. But break the subscription model that Spotify has helped to promote does not seem the most appealing for the user accustomed to it, especially when there are alternatives already implemented that have been applying it for some time with reasonable success.
