Gross sales of digital audiobooks are persevering with their strong development in 2024, based on most trade sources, and a few within the guide enterprise level to Spotify’s fall entrance into the market as an vital think about these gross sales features. Nonetheless, questions stay as to how the streaming big’s audiobook program will have an effect on the guide enterprise—particularly in terms of authors’ earnings.
Publishers, as a complete, have been bullish on the platform. Robert Thompson, CEO of HarperCollins father or mother firm Information Corp, has repeatedly known as Spotify a sport changer for the audiobook market; the 14% rise in audiobook gross sales on the writer in its most up-to-date monetary quarter, which accounted for about half of HC’s digital income, seemingly proving his level.
For its half, Spotify has persistently highlighted its “exponential” audiobook development, in addition to its advantages for authors. In April, it asserted that impartial authors have benefitted from the introduction of audiobooks, and that those that provide them by way of the platform, sometimes through Spotify’s Findaway Voices service, “have seen a 95% bounce of their royalties.” However the firm declined to supply particulars on the precise royalty quantities or what these authors had beforehand been paid, making firm’s declare inconceivable to quantify.
This opacity has left others within the trade, together with some brokers, cautious of Spotify, and has raised questions on how, precisely, authors are paid beneath the Spotify system. Main the cost for extra transparency is an activist group known as the Coalition of Involved Creators, which is backed by enterprise capitalist Bradley Tusk, founder and CEO of Tusk Ventures and writer of the 2018 guide The Fixer: My Adventures Saving Startups from Demise by Politics (Portfolio).
The group made its presence recognized at this 12 months’s London E-book Honest with a collection of splashy billboards round Olympia London, the place the truthful was held, bearing the slogan: “Do not let Spotify do to authors what it did to musicians.” The most recent salvo from the group is the discharge of the outcomes of a brand new on-line survey, performed by Edison Analysis from April 26 to Could 10, of 1,035 adults who listened to an audiobook within the final 12 months.
Among the many survey’s extra conventional findings had been that 57% of respondents have listened to at the very least one audiobook at no cost by way of a file sharing web site or YouTube within the final 12 months. As well as, 54% of respondents bought a digital audiobook, 52% listened by way of a subscription service, 47% used a credit score by way of a subscription service, and 43% borrowed by way of a library app.
Drilling down on Spotify, the survey discovered that 73% of Spotify listener respondents obtained an audiobook from a file sharing web site or YouTube within the final 12 months, whereas 70% listened as a part of a subscription service. (Spotify’s personal service launched within the U.S. November.) Ease-of-use was listed by 67% of Spotify listener respondents as a cause for utilizing the service to take heed to audiobooks; 82% of those that take heed to audiobooks most frequently by way of the platform mentioned it did a “good job” of being simple to make use of, and 47% of respondents characterised it as doing an “wonderful” job.
The research then dug into to the thorny query of how authors are compensated beneath the Spotify mannequin. Writer compensation has been the first concern on the Coalition of Involved Creators since its launch; a assertion on its web site reads, partially, that the group is “involved that this product could devalue the artwork type and hurt the livelihoods of numerous authors who depend on guide gross sales and audiobook royalties to maintain their inventive careers.”
In response to queries about its survey, a coalition spokesperson informed PW that “primarily based on suggestions we have heard from our member base, royalty statements are extremely obscure, there’s nonetheless no readability whether or not streaming royalties can be a separate line merchandise on statements, and there’s little transparency into how authors are faring to this point on streaming platforms like Spotify.”
Survey responses to questions asking if shoppers thought creators had been being paid pretty did appear to point a scarcity of readability round how authors generally are paid for audiobook gross sales: solely 10% of audiobook shoppers surveyed mentioned they had been “very acquainted” with how authors are paid for audiobooks, whereas 63% had been “not very” or “by no means” acquainted. Nonetheless, a coalition spokesperson mentioned, the aim of the survey was to get shopper enter on Spotify’s mannequin, for the reason that viewpoints of many authors and brokers are already broadly obtainable.
At the beginning of the survey, 12% of audiobook shoppers felt that authors had been paid “very pretty” for audiobooks and 44% “considerably pretty.” Twenty-one % mentioned “not pretty in any respect,” and 23% mentioned they weren’t certain.
Midway by way of the survey, respondents had been supplied with details about considerations that streaming audio companies weren’t being clear and constant in how they pay authors of audiobooks. The data, a spokesperson for Edison mentioned, was pulled from media protection—together with PW’s personal reporting in addition to that of Bloomberg, the Bookseller, the Guardian, and the New York Occasions—and public statements issued by skilled writer organizations together with the Writer’s Guild and the Society of Authors.
After studying concerning the compensation considerations pertaining to Spotify, 49% of all audiobook shoppers mentioned that that they had a “a lot much less” or “considerably much less” favorable opinion of streaming audio companies that supply audiobooks. Thirty-eight % mentioned that studying the considerations had no impact on their opinion, and 13% mentioned it made them extra favorable to the service and its phrases. Spotify audiobook listeners had been much less more likely to report an unfavorable opinion, with 43% saying that that they had a much less favorable opinion after studying concerning the considerations and 19% reporting a extra favorable opinion.
The authors of the research mentioned that the survey outcomes indicate that “Spotify audiobook listeners expertise a kind of cognitive dissonance when being confronted with the considerations surrounding the service they select to make use of.” A coalition spokesperson added that the group hoped that the survey would immediate Spotify to supply “knowledge to be shared with authors in the identical means it has traditionally been shared with musicians” as a way to “give each stakeholder extra readability into the economics of audiobook streaming.”
