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Spotify's push into audiobooks sparks concern among authors
- unsupp0rted 3y agoIf Spotify wants to keep my business for years to come, pretty much regardless of their monthly price, this is a good way to do it.
- Daenks 3y agoNot all authors are against this either. Some big names are all in supporting Spotify (and other new audiobook platforms) because they are sick of Amazon/Audible monopoly. Personally though, Spotify's audiobook user experience is paltry compared to a dedicated app.
- mark_l_watson 3y agoHow does Spotify affect ‘number of books sold’ statistics? I am an author and I don’t much care about statistics (the win for me is how often my readers directly engage with me) but I have a couple of author friends who are obsessed with sales numbers. This year I have been shifting content platforms, buying audio books from Libra.fm and buying eBooks from Kobo. That said I am still a loyal Amazon, Apple Books, and Google Play Books customer.
- maccard 3y agoHonest question, does it really matter? Stuff like this [0] makes the whole thing moot. [0] https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a42189320/the-new-york-times-best-seller-lists-explained/ https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a42189320/the-ne...
- mark_l_watson 3y agoI don't think it matters too much. I know someone who is a little obsessed with gaming Amazon book rankings - sort of the same thing as NYT bestsellers list.
- mg 3y agoHow far away are we from AI reading books so well that everybody who has the book in text form automatically has it in audio form, because they can just turn it into audio via a multitude of AI text to speech networks? By the way, I would love a service where I could listen to HN. Play the first title and then wait for me to hit the space bar to play the next. Highlight the one I just heard, so when I'm interested int a submission, I have it right in front of me.
- sxg 3y agoWe're already there. I use Readwise Reader and often take advantage of the text-to-speech feature for listening to articles from the Economist. The Economist already provides an audio narration of the article by a human, but some of the narrators' British accents are a bit too thick and difficult for me to understand at 1.5x. Readwise Reader's text-to-speech does a much better job at 1.5x for my American English brain. AI-narration isn't perfect—here are some issues I have encountered: - Section headers are read just like regular body text, which is confusing - Not great with reading numbers. Narrating a year is very different from narrating a monetary value. - Parenthetical statements are read just like regular body text
- mmahemoff 3y agoI also use Readwise Reader and the speech update they dropped a month ago made great strides towards AI reading. It’s just missing some UX improvements now, mainly the ability to continue playing across multiple articles. It’s also not smart enough to skip boilerplate junk that appears on top and bottom of every newsletter, which is easy to skip over visually but a pain when read out loud. A while ago, Amazon tried adding TTS to kindle and got immediately slammed by the publishers, so they withdrew it. However, with the current state of AI, I think users will start to demand it as a standard feature of anything they’re reading. Not only can it read at human-like capability, it can do so in any voice theoretically. Soon you’ll also be able to pause it and ask questions about what it just read or to summarize the rest of the article and so on.
- elektor 3y ago
- treesknees 3y agohttps://archive.is/xGnb2 https://archive.is/xGnb2
- clircle 3y agoSpotify's push to include more shit that will further crowd the UI and require spamming us outside the OS's native notification protocol sparks annoyance among users.
- jmuguy 3y agoYes, I can't wait for another "app drawer" alongside podcasts that I'm forced to ignore. This is causing me start buying music more and more from bandcamp so I can have control over all of this again.
- photonthug 3y agoYeah, the UI and pushy insistent ux is nearly intolerable. I hate that they do this kind of stuff to already-paying customers.
- rchaud 3y agoPaying, but not paying enough. Spotify's music streaming business is unprofitable, filling the inventory with cheaper content (and raising prices each year) is the only way.
- slater- 3y agomeanwhile they've pillaged the music industry on their way to not make any money off it
- photonthug 3y agoBill us what it costs then, consumers don't want hidden fees. Harassment, like resort fees and fake taxes, is a hidden fee.
- rchaud 3y agoThey'll lose customers if they charge a market price, it's already as expensive as most streaming video options (many of those are also not profitable). This is the Silicon Valley B2C model writ large: charge below-market prices with VC funds, hoover up millions of users, go public, then use outside financing to cover the operating losses and invest in new business areas. Finally, when financing becomes expensive, start raising prices.
- politelemon 3y agoDo the authors have a say in whether their books appear on Spotify or is that power entirely with the publishers?
- criddell 3y agoI would imagine it depends on individual contracts. If they’ve sold those rights, then no.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hx8 3y agoI would be concerned too. * Only being paid when a book is finished is bogus. I have a few audio books that have listened to for only a portion of the book. The biggest example being Seveneve where I don't want to listen to part 3 again. * The 15 hour monthly limit might begin to act as pressure to keep audio books length under 15 hours. Some in sci-fi can exceed that limit now.
- ta988 3y agoIt would be as if I would pay my bookstore only when I have finished my book. It sometimes take me years to go through a pile of books from a shopping spree. Edit: wrote library meant bookstore
- josho 3y agoMy observation is that publishers have already pushed authors to write shorter novels and simply split those into multiple parts. Why sell one book when you can sell a three part series. This means the 15 hour limit is likely to only affect older novels before publishers caught onto this strategy.
- rchaud 3y agoFirst the big-budget move into podcasts and now audiobooks; Spotify appears to be admitting they'll never make any money from streaming music. Maybe in a few years they'll go Netflix and the app will just have 20,000 store-brand bands all signed to Spotify Records.
- evan_ 3y agoDon’t forget their clubhouse competitor Spotify Live which they shuttered earlier this year
- crorella 3y agoI don’t understand why Spotify keeps diluting its focus. I moved to Qobuz once a bunch of podcast started to pollute the UI and now it is only getting worse.
- TehCorwiz 3y agoMusic has very low margins. The record industry eats the most of the revenue pie. By extending into other audio areas they leverage their existing infrastructure around audio encoding and delivery to provide a service with higher marginal revenue.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mips_r4300i 3y agoSpotify is constantly finding new ways to irritate me when opening their app. I just want to listen to music, but their app wants me to look at modal popups for promos I don't care about, and recommends me music genres that neither I nor anyone I know wants. I'm worried that ZIRP and the demand to constantly grow will cause Spotify to enshittify itself into irrelevance.
- ThrowawayIP 3y agoThe push into audiobooks feels like the start of the ehshittification of Spotify Premium. With an artificial limit of 15 hours of listening, can we expect to have to start paying for specific albums or releases?
- troupo 3y agoHaving worked in audiobooks before, those limits usually come from rights holders, not from the streaming service. (I work for Spotify now, but have no idea what the audiobook licensing is there, and couldn't tell you if I did know)
- photonthug 3y agoYep, the golden age of streaming seems to be coming to an end on all platforms. Get ready to have to endure ads and other harassment, even as a paying customer. Install the app! Got the app already? We saw you were enjoying Beethoven so on a related note have you considered buying Taylor Swift concert tickets?
- GuB-42 3y agoWhat's fundamentally different between music and audiobooks? And more generally, what's so different between literature and other media? For movies and music, we have streaming services where we have access to everything for a monthly fee, or we can buy one off physical or digital copies. For (audio) books, there is no equivalent to the streaming model, subscriptions are just giving you access to a set number of works per month. That's especially ironic since libraries have been "all you can read" since before computers even existed. I have seen online libraries use ridiculous DRM schemes to emulate the fact that they have a limited number of copies to lend, why? Video games are also not sold through "all you can play" platforms, but this is more understandable since they are more difficult to standardize due to their nature, and the monetization schemes are varied, and yet we are getting there.