On its way to encompass everything, Spotify has just entered the audiobook market

In recent times we realized that Spotify wanted to go beyond music and podcasts. Just over three months ago, the company revealed in a meeting with its investors that would enter the audiobook market. Today, finally, he is doing it.

Under the idea of ​​becoming the application that concentrates the distribution of the main audio content formats that people consume, Spotify now also offers a catalog of 300,000 audiobooks for users in the United States.

Spotify enters fully into audiobooks

According to a statement, the deployment of audiobooks in the US market is only the first step. The company assures that, based on this experience, it will continue betting on the training and will plan launches in other countries.

Spotify sees an important business opportunity in this format and does not want to be left out. Although audiobooks represent a market share of between 6 and 7% in the United States, this category is growing approximately 20% each year.

The truth is that the company will not be alone in the universe of audiobooks. Audible, Amazon’s commitment to this segment (already available in Spain), currently dominates the general market with a subscription service that opens the door to a catalog of 90,000 titles.

Spotify, however, proposes a different proposal from that of its main competitor: each audiobook must be purchased individually. The catalog can be consulted from the app and when choosing one, users will be redirected to a web page.

Can’t buy within the app? Just as it is not possible to subscribe directly from the app, it will not be possible to buy books from there either. This is due to Spotify’s struggle to avoid paying Apple’s App Store fees of up to 30%.

The company, although it uses an external page to complete the purchase of audiobooks, promises that the process will be simple. Once the payment has been chosen and processed, this will appear automatically in the dedicated section within the application library.

It remains to be seen if Spotify manages to convince users to pay individually for each audiobook instead of paying a subscription and to which other countries this proposal will reach. What is clear is that the audio market continues to transform.

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