Spotify’s new 30-hour audiobook plans are too short to finish long books
Spotify has launched two new Audiobooks Plus add-on subscriptions that allow Premium users to double their audiobook listening limit to 30 hours. They’re available to individual Premium subscribers and users who manage Family and Duo plans. Other users on Premium accounts can now also request 15 hours of audiobook access from their plan manager. However, the new plans are still too short for those who prefer to listen to longer books.
The 30-hour limit won’t get you through titles like George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones or Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings, for example. You could listen to two or three smaller novels instead, but if you want to re-listen to them in the future, you’ll have to sacrifice those hours again. I recently listened to the almost 33-hour-long audiobook for The Eye of the World, the first book in Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series, in a single weekend, which I would be unable to even finish with Spotify’s add-on. If you listen to books of a similar length over a few days, you’d have nothing left for the rest of the month.
And you can forget about buying books to get around these issues — any audiobook included in Premium isn’t available for Premium subscribers to purchase. I scoured through Spotify’s audiobook listings to find anything I could buy as a Premium subscriber and came up with nothing. By comparison, Audible’s $14.95 premium plan gives users an entire free book each month that they can keep forever, and frequently has titles on sale for far less than the price of Spotify’s time-based top-ups. The payouts that Spotify gives to authors are reportedly better than what Audible pays, but it sucks that Spotify makes it so difficult to support authors directly with purchases.
These add-ons are currently only available for Spotify Premium users in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, and the Netherlands, following initial tests in Ireland and Canada. Pricing will vary by region. In the UK, both Audiobook add-ons are priced at £8.99 (about $12, which could double the $11.99 individual Premium plan pricing in the US).
Spotify will eventually introduce similar plans to the US, according to TechCrunch, though users in that region already have the option to purchase 10-hour audiobook top-ups for $12.99. The main perk here is convenience — these rolling add-on subscriptions will automatically allow Premium users to listen to 30 hours of audiobooks each month without needing to buy top-ups.
“Since the launch of Audiobooks in Premium, we’ve introduced millions to audiobooks and given them the flexibility to discover even more titles and authors, which the credit model limits,” Spotify’s Director of Audiobooks Strategy and Operations, Shaela Greenfield, told The Verge. “We know book fans on Spotify crave more opportunities to listen, and we’re excited to make that possible with Audiobooks Plus.”
“The feedback from our early tests in Canada and Ireland is positive, and now even more users around the world can take advantage, ” said Greenfield. “We will continue to unlock more offerings that bring optionality to users and drive growth for authors and the entire publishing industry.”
The 15 hours provided to Premium subscribers is a “nice to have” if you also stream music on the platform, especially if you only listen to a handful of shorter book titles every month. Spotify also has a $9.99 audiobook-only Premium plan that provides 15 hours of listening with no music perks if you prefer to listen to your tunes elsewhere.
Update, July 18th: added a statement from Spotify’s Shaela Greenfield.