Did you know Spotify offered literature? In case your Release Radar and podcast rotation are getting a bit stale, the streaming platform has announced that they’ll be offering all paid subscribers 15 free hours of audiobook listening per month. The feature was initially rolled out in the UK and Australia, and is now available in the US as of Wednesday, November 8th.
Spotify began making audiobooks available back in September 2022, but at the time, even premium subscribers had to pay à la carte for each title. Now, the company is making their library of more than 200,000 titles a little bit more accessible to paid subscribers by including those 15 hours of listening time in their monthly bill, with the option to pay to add more time or purchase a book.
Many bestsellers are listenable on Spotify, thanks to partnerships with big-name publishers like Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster. The company says this makes it the “largest of any subscription-based audiobook streaming platform currently on the market.”
Spotify has been in a squabble with Apple over in-app audiobook purchases, but this new offering might also give Spotify a loophole in app store regulations. As The Hollywood Reporter points out, if Spotify allowed users to buy an audiobook through their app, 30 percent of that revenue would have to go to Apple. Now, subscribers can spend 15 hours getting sucked into a good story for no additional cost — at least, until the Spotify app directs them to buy the audiobook on a desktop instead.