https://www.dailydot.com/news/spotify-premium-audiobook-fail/
A Spotify user found themselves disappointed after discovering that the audio streamer's audiobook only comes with 15 hours.
Oh Spotify, when will you stop trying to push people to the high seas 🏴☠️
Headline contains -
Opinion of random member of the public
The word "slams"
I'm not reading it because I've probably wiped better journalism off my arse this morning
Ten pictures of Feddit users reacting to clickbait headlines that will make you say "no, these are all trains. No, I'm complaining as such, I like trains, I just... I thought... No, the headline said something about... reactions, yeah, and ins- actually, hang on, how did you get in here?"
There's no need of "slam" -- or "eye," "mull," "Solons," usw -- in an era where you're not writing a 1-42-4.
(1 column, 42pt, four lines)
Its just unreasonable to expect spotify to be able to afford that when they already barely pay musicians.
The audiobooks help them pay even less for music:
With the introduction of the stand-alone audiobooks offering, Spotify is now able to pay lower music-licensing rates for the music-and-audiobook bundle, introduced in the U.S. in November 2023. The 2022 settlement agreement between the National Music Publishers Assn. and streaming services includes a carveout for bundles (such as Amazon Prime and Apple Music + Apple News), which the new audiobook offering falls under. Such plans lower the mechanical licensing rates the company pays in the U.S. Spotify’s lower royalty rates are retroactive to March 1, 2024.
However, NMPA president-CEO David Israelite had strong words for the move when contacted for comment by Variety. “It appears Spotify has returned to attacking the very songwriters who make its business possible,” he wrote. “Spotify’s attempt to radically reduce songwriter payments by reclassifying their music service as an audiobook bundle is a cynical, and potentially unlawful, move that ends our period of relative peace. We will not stand for their perversion of the settlement we agreed upon in 2022 and are looking at all options.” The NMPA and streaming services resolved a years-long standoff over royalty rates with a Copyright Royalty Board ruling in 2022, and agreed upon a new rate of 15.35% for the 2023-2027 period.
Barely paying musicians is a choice. In fact even the whole audiobook setup is a choice. Give me the epub and TTS and I'd be happy as Larry.
They could certainly "clearly pass the cost" of this on to the user by not offering Audiobooks to users who didn't pay for the "+ # of Audiobooks" tier of Spotify Premium; instead of this horrible enshittified crap where it cuts you off midsentence like a greedy telecomm provider would. Or perhaps their limitation should be on how many titles you can listen to concurrently in a certain time period. (So if you open X books; that's it; you have to shelve one or wait it out)
It certainly means that Spotify did a bad job at negotiating their rights to these audiobooks as well. That matters too; because that makes the product worse; and that should never have been allowed to happen. If they couldn't have offered it nicely, they could've just not offered it at all or added it to a higher service tier so that the cost is diverted better.
Pro tip: get audiobooks from your library…along with paper books, ebooks, games, movies, etc.
The real story's in the comments. This helped my single-mother-friend stay sane in the early/poorest years. Everyone needs to know how their library has changed since they last borrowed a book in 1982. Thanks for posting this -- I forgot too!
Oh Spotify, when will you stop trying to push people to the high seas
Spotify is worse than piracy. It's a robber baron.
I'm about 2/3 of the way through backing up my 'Liked' songs to MP3 files, at which point I'm ending my sub.
It's a bummer because I actually really like Spotify's algorithm and it suggests great music for my tastes, but, I can have that for free without feeding their stupid insatiable greed.
“the 15 hours customers get free with premium equates to two audiobooks” Is the average audiobook really that short!
For eragon it would takes months to finish.
The hobbit is 10 hours.
Think most of the books I’ve listened to have been over that length, but I don’t use Spotify. Self hosting for the win. No time limits in prologue
They probably have a bunch of 1 hour 'books' that mess with the average as shorter is cheaper to help pad out their numbers.
Looking at my personal library, the median length audiobook is The Last Wish at a tad over 10 hours. So it'd be equal to 1.5 books going by that, not the worst marketing exaggeration I've ever seen.
You can opt out of audiobooks and save the extra cost they added the other month. https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2024/05/spotify-saving-basic-plan-audiobooks/?source=CRM-MSETIP-84b484ca1c047788624
Thanks! I didn't know about this. I never use audiobooks. Just changed my family plan. £2 is £2!
So, is this the type of SLAM you'd typically see in a moshpit? Or are we talking about wrestling slams?
If you read the article, the main point was that Spotify doesn't inform about the limits clearly. Not the pricing.
Even now Spotify site says: "Spotify Premium: Listen without limits". Clearly there is a limit, but the limits are only mentioned after the first subscription button if you scroll far enough.
Audio books are no longer expensive to produce. I bet my ass most except for the biggest titles will be AI generated in very short time. Whether people like it or not.
My ass probably could appreciate real performance if I was into audiobooks overall, I just like books as books. I'm not exactly happy about all content being replaced with AI slop. However I don't think spotify cares, if something is cheaper they will go for it, just like other corpos.
Oh well I think they will be losing as well, people don't even really need the audio book providers anymore, since they could just do AI ebooks themselves if they just have the text ebook.