In a memo despatched to Audible employees final week, Audible CEO Bob Carrigan mentioned that, regardless of a powerful 2023, Audible is slicing its workforce. The cuts are believed to be about 5% of employees, or some 100 folks.
Declaring that Audible’s enterprise “is in fine condition,” Carrigan mentioned the cuts have been essential “to place us for continued success within the coming 12 months and into the longer term, given the more and more difficult panorama we face.” He added that “getting leaner and extra environment friendly is the best way we might want to function now—and within the foreseeable future—to be able to proceed delivering best-in-class audio storytelling to our prospects world wide.”
The cuts come regardless of the continued development of digital audiobook gross sales however with the trade, and Audible, going through an unsure surroundings in 2024. Spotify’s long-awaited entry into within the digital audiobook house started final 12 months, and is predicted to supply the primary actual problem to Audible out there this 12 months. And new breakthroughs in AI are additionally bringing challenges, in addition to alternatives, to platforms that promote audiobooks from conventional publishers.
In early November, Amazon’s self-publishing big, Kindle Direct Publishing, introduced that it had begun a beta check on know-how permitting KDP authors to supply audiobook variations of their e-books utilizing digital voice narration, and that the audiobooks could be offered by way of Audible. The flexibility to create an audiobook utilizing artificial speech know-how is more likely to end in a increase within the variety of audiobooks produced by KDP authors, since solely 4% of titles self-published by way of KDP have an audiobook obtainable. A research accomplished by one impartial researcher based that dozens of artificial voice narrated audiobooks rapidly turned up on the Audible web site.
The Audible layoffs come as different elements of Amazon’s enterprise are additionally lowering employees. Quick Firm reported that Amazon’s Prime Video and MGM Studios unit have been additionally slicing payroll, whereas the Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch additionally eradicated jobs.
