Spotify goes audio…again!

The audio industry has seen some jitters in the past few days, with Spotify officially hopping onto the audiobook bandwagon with an amazing collection of almost 300,000 titles, if the news sources are to be believed, it’s something that had already been in the works for a long time.

With Spotify being a major player in the music industry and sitting atop the podcasting segment, it was only a matter of time before it dabbled into audiobooks as well, it would be particularly interesting to see how it keeps in touch with competition from Amazon’s Audible, especially after the latter has already scoured the market for a long time and is in pole position when it comes to audiobooks. Is this the Bob Carrigan vs Daniel Ek in the audio bragging rights ring?

Another interesting titbit picked up by me during my research hunt was the fact that Spotify has decide to price audiobooks the a-la-carte way rather than providing some incentive to existing Premium subscribers. The industry giant has decided to stick with a more bookstore-based experience, wherein each user is expected to pay for a particular book rather than just buying a subscription and availing the feature of multiple books all at once. Although, the VP of Spotify has made it public that this payment structure is not rigid, it shall be interesting to see how the course of this changes over time.

A fact that remains unattested is that with this idea is that it has become even more clear that audio-centric media is becoming the norm and is set to replace the face of content creation now more than ever, with even more people dipping in podcasts and audiobooks is it time you, as a creator, author or a brand shift focus as to how you look at the content you put out and think different. Think NarrationBox.