Spotify adds free Audiobooks to Premium Subscriptions at no extra cost
Spotify is adding more than 150,000 audiobooks as part of existing Spotify Premium subscriptions in the UK and Australia starting today and in the US this winter.
In the announcement, Spotify said that as it has done in music and podcasting, this offering will “fuel the audiobook industry by empowering authors, publishers, and creators to innovate and enable discovery at a never-seen-before scale.”
The Spotify Premium audiobooks catalog will include more than 70% of bestselling titles from around the world, including Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, and RB Media, as well as independent publishers like Dreamscape and Pushkin.
Spotify’s catalog has more than 100 million audio tracks and 5 million podcasts.
Audiobooks in Premium will also include:
- A catalog of over 150,000 audiobooks as part of existing Spotify Premium subscriptions.
- Access to 15 hours of audiobook listening each month as part of each existing Premium subscription. Additional 10-hour allocations can be purchased as top-ups whenever needed.
- Any audiobook marked as “Included in Premium” can be listened to with a Spotify Premium subscription.
- Users can also:
- Track their monthly audiobook listening time and see how much they have left at any point in their in-app settings.
- Take audiobooks wherever they go; Spotify works on over 2,000 devices from over 200 brands.
- Download audiobooks for offline listening (master account holders only), and Spotify’s automatic bookmarking feature saves their place so they can easily pick up where they left off. To maximize their consumption time, listeners can utilize Sleep Timer, which will help conserve their 15-hour allotment.
- Find audiobooks by searching for particular titles in their Home feed and in the Audiobooks hub, which features an editorially curated selection of top titles.
Bruce Houghton is the Founder and Editor of Hypebot, a Senior Advisor at Bandsintown, President of the Skyline Artists Agency, and a Berklee College Of Music professor.
