Over the course of 30 years, Audible’s catalogue has grown to incorporate greater than 470,000 audiobooks, a minimum of in accordance with their very own adverts. In lower than a 12 months, Spotify’s catalogue has grown to incorporate greater than 200,000 audiobooks, which is already 42.6% of Audible’s providing. Because the catalogues of every audiobook platform change into much less differentiated, firms like Spotify and Audible will more and more flip to different technique of differentiation, from totally different codecs to totally different pricing.

Spotify already has the upperhand on the subject of format diversification and now, arguably, pricing, however Audible just isn’t taking that mendacity down. Now that Spotify is encroaching on Audible’s audiobook turf, Audible is returning the favour, dipping its toe into useful audio. In coordination with World Sleep Day, Audible introduced the launch of recent sleep and relaxation-related titles for his or her current Sleep Assortment. In response to Audible, the Sleep Assortment is designed for customers to “uncover bedtime tales, soundscapes, meditations, and extra created that will help you sleep and discover leisure any time of day.” In impact, it’s an audio playlist that includes A-list celebrities and compositions designed to assist customers go to sleep — precisely the type of content material for which listeners proceed to show to Spotify.

Why format issues lower than operate

Purposeful audio has all the time been round, a minimum of implicitly. Radio has lengthy supplied information, climate, and visitors data; muzak has lengthy crammed awkward silences in public locations; and disco has all the time made us dance. With the expansion of playlists and algorithmic suggestions on streaming platforms, the operate of sure audio has, for the primary time, change into express, diversified, and nearly infinite.

With the expansion of contextual playlists primarily based on temper and exercise, the road between music and sound, white noise and whale music has change into much less and fewer distinguishable, resulting in entire ecosystems of “pretend artists” and AI-generated soundscapes for meditation, sleep, and another exercise you possibly can consider. As genre-based editorial playlists diminish in affect, useful, algorithmic, and personalised programming continues to take the lion’s share of passive audio consumption — not solely as a result of it appears to be what customers are more and more on the lookout for, but in addition due to decrease overhead.

Although Spotify lords over the useful music area now, useful podcasts and audiobooks will not be but a significant providing on the platform. That makes Audible’s useful audio transfer significantly attention-grabbing. Audible might not have music per se, however useful soundscapes for which they don’t have to pay out royalties might, on the very least, maintain present gentle customers from leaping ship to Spotify. In the most effective case state of affairs, Audible might even begin to swing the audiobook battle again in their very own path.

Spotify brings music performance to audiobooks and podcasts

Spotify, after all, just isn’t prone to decelerate its characteristic growth. In mid-March 2024, the platform rolled out Countdown Pages for audiobooks, providing the identical type of pre-save performance that already exists for music artists. Every week later, Spotify added public follower stats to podcasts, which can be a characteristic that exists for artist profiles.

At first look, these options may seem to be novelties, however they really serve to encourage advertising and marketing efforts by publishers, authors, and podcast creators, and that finally helps Spotify get extra attain, extra on-platform utilization, and extra subscribers. For Spotify, protecting a aggressive edge isn’t just about content material and pricing differentiation — additionally it is about characteristic differentiation. For Audible to really maintain tempo, the platform should think about how publishers and creators market themselves and drive their followers to the platform.