The music streaming platform Spotify announced on Monday the launch in France and the Benelux countries of an audio book listening offer, with major French publishing groups as partners.
“Spotify today announces the expansion of its audiobook service to its first non-English speaking markets: France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg,” the Swedish group said in a press release.
This service offers 15,000 titles in French, 15,000 in Dutch and in total more than 200,000 titles, mainly in English. In France, Spotify competes with Amazon Audible and two other Swedes, Storytel and Nextory.
The Swedish giant is already present in a French-speaking market, Canada, where according to it the growth in listening to books in French has been very rapid since the launch in April. “This trend should be confirmed with the arrival of the service in France and other Western European countries,” he said.
Its advantage is to offer its “premium” subscribers (11.12 euros per month for the individual plan), or around 246 million subscribers, who come for music and podcasts, 12 hours of listening to audio books per month.
An average of five hours of book listening
Where this service already exists, most Spotify subscribers are content with it, with the average book listening time being five hours. If they want more listening hours, they can purchase them extra.
“I think that the market in France has yet to even take the measure of what its full potential is,” said David Kaefer, who heads the audiobook division within Spotify, during a conference of press in Paris.
Hachette Livre (via its subsidiary Audiolib), Editis (Lizzie) and Madrigall will supply books, under undisclosed commercial conditions.
Madrigall’s director of digital distribution, Éric Marbeau, welcomed the fact that Spotify offers listening in time and not in number of titles. According to him, “there we will actually be able, with hours included in our subscription, to explore the catalogs a little more and we think that this will help us to better promote our funds”, he declared to the press.
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With AFP
