In Spotify’s rapidly evolving quest to become the home of all things audio, the company announced Tuesday that it’s bringing narrated long-form magazine articles to its app. The articles will be available to Premium subscribers as part of their 15 hours of audiobook listening time per month. Free users can choose to purchase standalone articles for $1.99.
The streaming service said that starting today, there will be over 650 magazine articles (available in English only) from a collection of stories that includes publications such as Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, Vogue, Variety, Billboard, Vibe, GQ, Wired, Vanity Fair and Pitchfork. Spotify says the articles were produced in-house by its audiobook team and complement Spotify’s existing audio offerings, such as podcasts.
Spotify tells TechCrunch that the narrated articles will use a mix of human and digital voice narration, and that the portion of the articles that use digital voice narration will be clearly labeled to users.
In addition to being another means of bringing monetized audio to its app, Spotify believes the addition of articles could encourage users to try a different type of listening beyond music, which could ultimately lead them to try other forms of long-term listening, like its potentially more profitable audiobooks.
“By bringing shorter-form content into the mix, we’re meeting audiences where they need to help build healthy listening habits, ultimately increasing engagement with books over time,” noted Colleen Prendergast, Licensing Lead at Spotify Audiobooks, in a blog post about the launch.
Currently, Spotify offers audiobook listening hours to its paid subscribers, as well as “top-up” hours when the listening time runs out. There’s also a $9.99 per month Audiobook Access plan for Spotify’s free music listeners and an $11.99 per month Audiobooks+ plan that doubles the listening hours.
The addition follows a deluge of news from the streamer in recent weeks. This led the company to take big leaps into the world of AI audio with new features like AI-generated podcasts, similar to those you could create with a research app like Google’s NotebookLM, AI-powered audiobook creation for authors, support for AI covers and remixes, and other, non-AI features like fitness content.
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