Spotify Premium Will Include Instant Access to 150,000+ Audiobooks (UK/AUS tomorrow, US to follow)
Today we’re starting an entirely new chapter for our audiobooks offering by making more than 150,000 audiobooks available as part of Spotify Premium subscriptions.
Cool, now can we get a cheaper plan that just plays music?
Sorry, best we can do is make a new tier at the same price that only plays music, while we jack up the price of the new Premium Plan to account for 'rising market costs'!
To be fair spotify bleads money, because the big music labels are sucking most of the money out of spotify.
Podcasts and stuff are their way of trying to get out of that uncomfortable situation, because they own the rights of the stuff produced via their platform.
Perhaps as likely as YouTube Premium separating music access from no ads on videos... I wish. It keeps me locked in.
They had that YouTube Premium Lite tier in a few regions, which was basically that. But Google just killed it.
Hard to beat $10 for unlimited music and podcasts + soon to be audiobooks
It's understandable why they are doing this. Apparently the company has never ever made any profits, and since the main 3 record labels are demanding 70% of the revenue from Spotify, they can't do anything to change that revenue split to 50-50 instead as an example.
15 hours per month... just use Libby and a library card and get unlimited audiobooks for free.
https://libro.fm is a an interesting alternative to audible if you can pay.
No DRM and if your local bookshop registered themselves a percentage of what you buy is paid to them.
Which sounds fine in theory until you realize they only have a very limited selection of a specific genre you're looking for.
"To start, we’re offering each Premium individual, as well as plan managers for Family and Duo accounts, 15 hours of listening per month—giving them the ability to enjoy as many titles as they want within that monthly allocation.
[...]
For those super audiophiles who use up their 15 hours before their monthly billing cycles refresh, you can purchase a 10-hour top-up to finish that series. Not sure how many hours you have left? Check it at any time in your in-app settings. "
No cost listed on how much the top-ups are.
Thought this was an interesting addition, but I see they figured out a way to ruin it from the start.
I don't know if they have these, but for the purpose of clarity it doesn't matter.
The Martian is 11 hours.
The Color of Magic is 7 hours.
That's two audio books that together surpassed their joke of a monthly allotment. Two.
Ya, only offering 15 hrs means I won't even look into this.
I'd really love an audio book service like Netflix but 15 hours is a joke, that is 2 days worth of listening for me personally and a lot of books you wouldn't be able to finish in that time.
I've tried the majority of the audio books services out there and they are all a load of shit, I think I'll stick to piracy at this point, at least then I can keep the books I enjoy too to come back to again.
That's barely a quarter of Sanderson book...
fuck that.
Literally listening to White Sand right now :D love Sanderson!
Use Libby, with your library card. Unlimited audiobooks and works for almost any library.
No, no it doesn't. For a start I am not in the US so it isn't Libby and secondly I tried the library card / app route and the selection is woefully shite.
It doesn't even have what would be the most popular books for example say Lord of the Rings. It has a seemingly random selection. On top of that they have minimal licenses for the books so if you do manage to find something interesting you want to listen to someone may have already "rented it out" via the app and so you'd have to wait for them to "return" it before you can listen.
Library cards and apps (at least where I am) are one of the poorest choices available and that is saying something going up against the utter dogshit that is audible.
Libro.FM is DRM free and lets you buy any book once a month for a fixed cost.
Yeah I checked it out, it is basically audibles business model with the whole 1 credit a month thing. Yes, DRM free is great but I average 7-8 hours of listening a day so one book doesn't last very long at all.
Thanks for sharing! I do think audiobooks are a much better fit than trying to make podcasts exclusive and paywalled.
Great. More garbage I don't want shoved in my face.
I'm getting real tired of modern day UX in apps.
That's the joy of using proprietary software.
Spotify is and will always remain a music streaming app for me. I spend way more time listening to podcasts instead of music, but I don't do that in Spotify.
People on here are acting like Spotify raises their price every two weeks like Netflix or something. This is an added feature that will likely not raise the costs to the user as it is intended to reduce the part of revenue they give to music labels (i.e. this helps keep the price you pay the same because they can't make a profit, so the alternative is higher prices)
you mean something like this https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-07-24/adjusting-our-spotify-premium-prices/ ?
15 hours is pathetic lol. Need to hurry up and move my music library off of Spotify
"As many titles as they want"
Sooo... around one and a half standard length audio books a month, from a category probably filled with garbage romance novels and cheap sci fi. Be still my beating heart...
New feature isn't good.
Agreed
Stop using old features
What?
It's now one of my more expensive monthly subscriptions since I have the family plan, and they don't offer a way to pay for a year to save overall last time I checked. I'm just not as impressed as I used to be considering the price rose as well
Podcasts in the app are terrible but this is something if actually consider switching to Spotify for
For the 15 hours a month allocation of audiobook time...?
Yes. Especially if I don’t have to work with virtual book checkouts and return deadlines
It's moreso how they make audiobooks and podcasts a little subheading on the library page instead of being able to just switch over to full podcast and audiobook browsing.
I absolutely love that they're skip song button is a 30 second jump on podcasts, makes the car journey so easy.
I used to use Youtube for podcasts but it isn't good at skimming through bits without opening your phone and doesn't integrate with Android auto at all.
Dang nothing in Canada yet it looks like
No, Canada only gets the bad streaming changes first, like password sharing crackdowns and price hikes lmfao
I saw it pop up on mine, haven't tried it yet though
I'm only seeing them available for purchase.
I sense a price increase coming...
Absolutely. It's limited to 15 hours a month at the moment. Has price increase written all over it.
helpful I guess. I was excited when Spotify started to sell audiobooks but the pricing was just rediculous
I have the family account but I'm not the one who will use this. Hopefully it's not a pain to switch who can claim this because currently it's limited to the main account holder.
Jesus christ the people on here are impossible to please !
Yea I think people are just exhausted with what companies are doing and are distrustful of any changes. A lot of tech company changes recently have been somewhere between pointless to very anti-user.
This seems ok, and spotify is one of the services that I continue to pay for and use. It does what I want, and the price has been fairly similar for years. Any new features would be nice.
edit:
To start, we’re offering each Premium individual, as well as plan managers for Family and Duo accounts, 15 hours of listening per month—giving them the ability to enjoy as many titles as they want within that monthly allocation.
Well that's not amazing. I guess if you find something you like, you can use another service afterwards. What would be bad is if they made some audiobooks exclusive, like they did with podcasts before (partially?) reversing it
No one is obliged to be pleased and clap for Spotify.
I’ve been running modified Spotify IPAs and desktop scripts for years to get around paying premium; here’s to hoping that I can still play these audiobooks!
