Spotify launches paid tier dedicated to audiobooks for book lovers in US
In September 2022, Spotify introduced audiobooks for its Premium subscribers in US. After spotting a lot of interest from free users of the platform in audiobooks, Spotify has now rolled out an access tier dedicated to audiobooks.
The tier costs $9.99 a month, and allows free users 15 hours access of listening time on audiobooks.
The remaining hours do not get carried over at the end of the month, and expires. Those who subscribe to the dedicated audiobooks tier only, can continue to stream add-supported music on the platform. Subscribers of Spotify Premium already have access to the audiobooks.
The dedicated audiobooks access tier is only available in the US at the moment. Users in the US, UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Canada can directly purchase particular audiobooks on the platform. The audiobooks catalogue has over 300,000 titles, not all of which are available on the subscriber catalogue, which contains about 200,000 titles. Even those who do not have a Premium subscription can purchase individual audiobooks.
The audiobooks cannot be purchased on the smartphone application, and have to be purchased through the web version only, but can subsequently be accessed on the smartphone app. Existing Premium subscribers will have to discontinue their subscriptions, if they intend to use the audiobooks tier only.
The audiobooks feature allows Spotify users to download the audiobooks for offline playback, which has an automatic bookmarking feature. Users also get granular control over the speed of audiobook playback, and can choose to listen to the reading faster or slower than the original recording.
The audiobooks tier is not available in India, and neither are the audiobooks themselves. Spotify has indicated that it intends to iterate and improve on the audiobooks oriented features, and introduce the content in additional markets around the world.
