This summer, Spotify will introduce new Audiobooks+ add-on tiers aimed at heavy listeners who want additional listening hours. Later this year, the company plans to expand Audiobooks+ to Family and Student plans, bringing audiobook access to more household members, including younger listeners.
Spotify is also adding new conversational discovery features that allow users to ask for recommendations using natural language. Listeners can search for books by topic, genre, or author preferences, including requests tied to specific interests or travel plans.
The company said its Prompted Playlist feature, currently available in beta for music and podcasts, will expand to audiobooks later this summer. The tool lets users describe what they want to hear, then generates playlists based on listening history and broader contextual signals.
Spotify is simultaneously expanding tools for authors and publishers. Spotify for Authors will add support for 10 new languages, including French, German, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, and Latin American Spanish.
In June, Spotify will also begin rolling out an invite-only beta for Audiobook Creation Tools built into Spotify for Authors. Powered by ElevenLabs’ digital voice technology, the feature allows self-published authors to generate and publish audiobook versions of their work without exclusive distribution contracts. At launch, the tool will support English-language audiobooks in select markets.
Spotify said audiobook listening hours on the platform have increased 60% year over year, with nearly half of audiobook listeners discovering the format through Spotify within the last year.
The company also pointed to growing adoption of features like Page Match, which allows users to move between print or ebook versions and audiobook playback on Spotify. According to the company, listeners using Page Match showed listening increases of up to 55% over a month and finished books twice as fast.
Audiobooks+ has also become a growing subscription business for Spotify. The company said the offering has reached 1 million subscribers and is on pace to generate $100 million in annualized recurring revenue.
Rather than treating audiobooks as a standalone category, Spotify is increasingly integrating books into the same recommendation and personalization systems already powering music and podcast discovery. The company is betting that combining listening habits across multiple formats will deepen engagement and keep users inside Spotify’s broader media ecosystem for longer stretches of time.
This analysis is based on reporting from Spotify.
Image courtesy of Spotify.
This article was generated with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy and quality.
