Spotify is expanding its offerings with a pretty wide selection of narrated long-form magazine articles from several publications that are most likely already familiar to you. The audio streaming service has announced that it’s adding over 650 long-form articles to its audiobook library. While all the pieces it added are in the English language only, they will be available in all of Spotify’s regions where audiobooks are available.
The articles included in this rollout include pieces from Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, Vogue, Variety, Billboard, Vibe, GQ, WIRED, Vanity Fair and Pitchfork. Spotify has teamed up with more publications, but as you can see, the curated collection offers articles on topics subscribers are most likely interested in, namely music and technology. “With Articles, we’re introducing long-form journalism in audio as a natural extension of the music, podcasts, and audiobooks people already come to Spotify for, focused on topics we know they love,” said Colleen Prendergast, Licensing Lead at Spotify Audiobooks. Prendergast also said that by offering subscribers shorter formats to listen to, the hope is for them to interact more with books, particularly the audiobooks in Spotify’s library, over time.
Each narrated article Spotify has released is under two hours long, and subscribers can listen to them against their audiobooks listening time. A Spotify Premium subscription includes 15 hours of audiobook listening time a month. Voracious readers can purchase top-ups, however, such as the Audiobooks+ monthly add-on with higher listening time limits. They can also just purchase individual articles to listen to for $2 each.
The company said in its announcement that the narrated articles it released were produced in-house by the Spotify Audiobooks team. We’ve asked Spotify for clarification whether that means the narrations were done by human talents or generated using AI, and we’ll update this post when we hear back.
Spotify announced several generative AI-focused updates during the company’s investor day last week. One of the features it’s launching next month in the US will allow users to generate personal podcasts directly within Spotify by drawing from the user’s profile and any file they upload, including PDFs and URLs. It’s also launching “Prompted Playlists” for audiobooks, which can create playlists based on user’s prompts describing what they want to hear more of and their listening history.