Spotify Audiobooks Launched In English-Speaking Countries Outside The US

Aiming to give competition to Audible, Swedish music streaming giant Spotify has announced expanding its newly launched audiobooks service outside the US.

Aiming to give competition to Audible, Swedish music streaming giant Spotify has announced expanding its newly launched audiobooks service outside the US. Spotify will take its audiobooks service to other English-speaking markets such as the UK, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand. With this, Spotify will allow users to access its catalogue of audiobook titles from the streaming app, says a report by TechCrunch.

The music streaming platform first announced the support for audiobooks in September, but then it was only available in the US. It essentially allows users to listen to more than 3,00,000 audiobook titles, which can also be downloaded for offline listening.

Spotify has confirmed to TechCrunch that its users in the newly added markets will also have access to the same number of titles as those in the US do (more than 300,000).

Audiobooks shows up with a lock icon on the play button, indicating that users have to purchase it in order to listen. The automatic bookmarking feature helps users to save their place so that they can immediately resume where they left off.

"While audiobooks represent just a 6 to 7 per cent share of the wider book market, the category is growing by 20 per cent year over year," the company was quoted as saying.

In August this year, the platform was working on a new feature to let users post audio comments or reactions to music playlists. A Reddit user in Vietnam had first spotted the Spotify experiment.

Meanwhile, driven by the success of better-than-expected growth in markets like India and Latin America, Spotify had last month announced its total monthly active users (MAUs) grew 20 per cent YoY to 456 million in the quarter ending September 30, 2022. Spotify's MAUs in the second quarter were 433 million.

The Swedish music streaming giant also said its third quarterly performance was positively impacted by "outperformance" across all regions and better than expected intake in India as a result of a multimedia marketing campaign driving activations and reactivations. Spotify also witnessed growth across Latin America, led by Brazil, due to marketing and OEM strength.