Spotify invests in international audiobooks

Spotify announced that it is investing €1 million ($1.14mn) to increase the production of audiobooks in non-English languages, starting with French and Dutch. “In France, we are continuing to bring a younger, more diverse audience to audiobooks, with nearly 60% of listeners aged 18 to 34 accounting for over half of all listening hours,” the company says.

But, what is an audiobook? Some successful podcasts are reading out public domain stories, or works to which the podcaster has the rights. However, don’t think that monetising these podcasts-as-audiobooks is going to be easy: we’ve heard from one podcast network who acquired a successful story podcast only to discover that Spotify’s SPAN wouldn’t monetise it at all. The company’s monetisation policies say that earning money is restricted for content that “is a written work by authors read aloud without the addition [of] original content”.

Acast has signed a former Spotify exclusive show. The Receipts Podcast, hosted by Tolani Shoneye and Audrey Indome, launched in 2016, is also releasing episodes on YouTube, and will soon “launch its own dedicated studio setup”.