Spotify's catalog will expand as the company has announced plans to acquire the Findaway audiobook platform.
In addition to having a library of more than 325,000 titles, Findaway also distributes audiobooks on various platforms and matches authors with storytellers, which means creating audiobooks could become another source of revenue for Spotify.
Speaking to The Verge, Spotify's audiobooks manager Nir Zicherman said the acquisition "will expedite the addition of a catalog of audiobooks to the platform so users can efficiently get all the audio content they want in one place." single platform".
In addition to bringing more audiobooks to Spotify subscribers, Zicherman said the company is focusing on "democratization" by allowing more people to create and publish audiobooks.
Spotify has experimented with audiobooks in the past, releasing celebrity-narrated public domain classics and a Harry Potter audiobook in 2020, but this acquisition shows the company hopes to significantly expand its offering, just as it did. . .
If audiobooks turn out to be as popular as podcasts on Spotify, the acquisition could be very lucrative: The company announced that podcast ad revenue grew 627% year-over-year in July 2021, with podcast listening up 30%. .
According to The Verge, Findaway shares in the author's royalties. So when a user buys a book distributed by Findaway on Spotify, the music streaming service will earn money and also receive a portion of the revenue.
It sounds like you can buy individual audiobooks on Spotify, but we wouldn't be surprised if the company announces a new subscription tier to specifically cater to spoken word content in the coming months.
What about Spotify HiFi?
We've received several announcements from Spotify in recent weeks, including the ability to block other users on the platform, but we didn't get the one announcement we were hoping for: a Spotify HiFi release date.
Recently, we have seen various signs that Spotify HiFi is about to launch. We've seen screenshots of the Spotify HiFi logo in the app, as well as a Spotify HiFi onboarding video leaked by a Redditor.
According to a Spotify blog post, the new service will be available "later in 2021", and will be available as an upgrade to Premium. However, the end of the year is just around the corner and we still don't have a definitive release date.
Spotify HiFi was revealed earlier this year and will allow you to listen to your favorite songs in audio without losing CD quality. Spotify is one of the few major streaming platforms that doesn't offer lossless audio, and the move could help it bridge the gap between its services and competing platforms like Apple Music, Amazon Music HD, Tidal. And Deezer.
While HiFi doesn't include high-resolution audio streams like Apple Music and Amazon, CD-quality audio at 1411kbps will be a vast improvement over Spotify's current 320kbps offering.
Lossless audio formats have more detail and data than their lossy counterparts. This means hearing new details in songs that you've never heard before and might otherwise have been cut off by compressing data. However, it should also sound a bit wider and more enveloping, that too will largely depend on what headphones or speakers you're using.
We don't yet know how much Spotify HiFi will cost, but we think it will be more than the $9.99 / £9.99 / AU$11.99 base Spotify Premium price per month.
By contrast, Apple Music and Amazon Music HD offer high-resolution sound at no additional cost to their subscribers, and while Spotify has a superior music discovery platform and easier-to-use interface than its competitors, we don't know how much. people will choose to pay more for HiFi when they can get true hi-res sound from Spotify's biggest rivals.