The kingmaker will be the big publishers, but it will be consumers that that will be the kingmakers’ kingmaker – TNPS 2020.

“Spotify’s move into audiobooks is a seismic shift in the publishing landscape, but the ripples will take time to be felt”- TNPS August 2020.

2020… Those were the days. How the industry laughed when that upstart Spotify declared it was entering the audiobook market.

Come to that, how they laughed at my headline! What seismic shift? Spotify audiobooks would be a joke. Spotify was a music service for people who like their entertainment in three-minute doses, repeated ad infinitum. Audiobooks were for serious culture lovers, not K-Pop kids. They required commitment and dedication to listen to, not to mention being hellishly more expensive.

Spotify was more than welcome to juggle podcasting and audiobooks in the insignificant overseas markets Amazon barely knew existed and cared even less about. Go ahead and sign up some two-bit audiobook publishers in Narnia, or the Nordics, or whatever the Scandiwegians call their back yard nowadays.

Go give StoryBeat and Nextel a run for their money, fighting over countries the size of small villages. But don’t for one second think you’re welcome in the “proper” markets where the Big Boys play.

We US and UK publishers have a cozy deal with Audible, which we all pretend is not owned by our nemesis Amazon, and we will do everything in our power to keep foreign influences out of AmerInglish publishing, even if it means selling Simon & Schuster to the Germans!

In 2022 it happened – Spotify Audiobooks, that is, not the Germans buying Simon & Schuster – but no-one really noticed. But as I said back in 2020, “The kingmaker will be the big publishers, but it will be consumers that that will be the kingmakers’ kingmaker.“

Industry Shifts

And so it came to pass. By a most remarkable coincidence all the Big 5 publishers signed deals with Spotify, much to the alarm of the Luddite fringe intent on keeping publishing in the twentieth century. The reaction was much the same as towards AI. The Spotify deal is bad news for authors and publishers alike, not that anyone on Spotify would ever listen to an audiobook anyway (in the same way pundits insist no-one will ever read/listen to AI content.

Said pundits are probably the grandchildren of the industry Luddites who called out paperbacks as the end of civilisation, insisted manuscripts could not be sent by email, and called self-publishers the barbarians at the gate.

Expanding Reach

This month Spotify launched in new countries in Europe, with more planned, and has just this week announced a deal with Bloomsbury for over 1,000 audiobook titles.

Soundbite condemnation of the Spotify deal with the Big 5 briefly shattered the silence, with the Nicola Solomon and the Society of Luddites leading the charge. But that cacophony quickly died away as it became clear a lot of consumers were signing up for Spotify audiobooks and publishers were getting substantial new money.

Financial Impact

This week Spotify said: “Since launching audiobooks, Spotify has paid hundreds of millions of dollars to publishers on an annualized basis. With a global audience of more than 615 million listeners, Spotify provides a new platform for authors and rights holders to share their content.” 

Authors? Spotify doesn’t contract with Big 5 authors, so how much the authors see of this new revenue is not yet clear, but the loud silence from the Society of Authors and friends says it all.

But these are just early ripples in the publishing landscape, per my 2020 headline.

Amazon Rattled

More important we’ve just seen Amazon add audiobooks to its Amazon Music subscription service – something inconceivable even a year ago. although even back in January of this year it was evident Spotify was rattling Amazon’s cage.

When Markus Dohle returns to his grave each night (have you ever noticed how vampires love tuxedos?) he must be spinning non-stop at what that treacherous Nihar Malaviya was up to, signing deals with Germany’s arch-enemy Sweden.

This was Dohle whining to Philip Jones in The Bookseller in November 2021: “Look at these investments this week: big bucks flowing into the United States publishing industry, Storytel and Spotify entering the scene.”

This of course the man that was at that very moment attempting to spend millions of dollars to give a German company ownership of Simon & Schuster. You just couldn’t make it up.

A Strong Year for Audible. You’re fired!

Returning to January 2024 and Amazon’s rattled cage, and there was Audible cutting 5% of jobs as it announced a “strong year” and that the “business is in good shape.”

And now Amazon is throwing audiobooks into Amazon Music. Were Amazon Music subscribers heading to Spotify for the audiobook extra? Were Audible customers switching to Spotify? That’s far from clear, but unlikely to have worried Amazon too much.

But what we can safely say is that Amazon saw Spotify reaching new audiobook consumers that were not buying from Audible, and that Amazon was missing out on substantial new revenue streams from music lovers that, much to Amazon’s surprise, liked books as well as music.

It’s not often we see Amazon playing catch-up, but right now Spotify is leading the changes in an expanding global audiobook market, that can only get bigger and better as the Luddite resistance to AI-assisted audiobooks gives way to the new dawn.

This post first appeared in the TNPS LinkedIn newsletter.