Spotify is making its biggest push into audiobooks so far. The company has started rolling out audiobook access to more than 180 markets across Europe, the Americas, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, with the rest of the expansion arriving over the coming months. Spotify says the change puts audiobooks in front of more than 750 million users. Until now, the service was mostly limited to English-speaking countries such as the US, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, with Germany as the main exception.
The expansion only matters if the catalogue holds up, and that has long been the hard part for audiobook services outside English. Spotify says new markets will have access to more than 350,000 titles across over 120 languages. Spain gets more than 45,000 Spanish-language titles at launch. The company says it now works with more than 300 publishers, including Planeta and Mondadori. That sounds substantial, but the depth of local-language libraries will vary a lot by market, and a headline title count says little about how well a given country is served.
The pricing model stays the same and remains somewhat confusing. Premium subscribers in eligible countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Poland, Chile, Norway and Peru get 12 hours of audiobook listening each month. There is also a standalone Audiobook+ subscription with a 15-hour allowance, and listeners can buy individual titles outright. Students in select regions will be able to add Audiobook+ to their plans from November. Time-based allowances suit casual listeners, but anyone who gets through several long books a month will hit the cap quickly. Audible’s credit system avoids that problem.
Spotify says the strategy is working. The company claims Audiobook+ has passed one million subscribers and more than 100 million in annual recurring revenue since it launched last year. It also says monthly audiobook listeners grew 40 percent over the past year and listening hours rose 30 percent. Those numbers are self-reported, but they explain why Spotify keeps building around books rather than treating them as a side feature.
This year has brought a steady run of additions. Page Match lets readers scan a page of a printed book and jump to the same point in the audio version, and Spotify says around one million people use it each month. The company has also added Audiobook Charts, an AI narration tool for authors built on ElevenLabs models, and trials of physical book sales in the US and UK.
Spotify is no longer just a music app that also carries audiobooks. It is turning into a general bookstore with a streaming service attached, and Audible now faces a rival with a much larger global user base. How quickly the local catalogues fill out will decide whether those 750 million users actually start listening.
