Spotify on Thursday made a big push to have more audiobooks on its platform by buying US-based audio tech company Findway as it tries to recreate its success with podcasts. Findaway, which has partnerships with audiobook publishers like Amazon’s audible, Apple iBooks, Google and Storytel offer a global audio book catalogue. It also has Voices, which helps authors self-publish.
“This is the first big step … what we want to achieve is Spotify For consumers to be able to buy any audio book on Spotify and listen to it,” Chief R&D Officer Gustav Söderström said in an interview. Terms of the transaction, which is expected to close in the fourth quarter, were not disclosed. it was done.
Spotify is following a playbook similar to its podcast business. It forayed into podcasts in 2018, boosting it with a string of acquisitions and is expected to overtake Apple as the largest podcast provider by analysts by the end of the year, with more than 3 million titles.
The company, which already has a tie-up with Swedish audiobook streaming group Storytel, to allow its customers to listen to audiobooks, also launched an open access platform for publishers to stream their content.
“We know from a survey that many of our users who listen to true crime podcasts also buy audiobooks about true crime,” Soderstrom said. “It’s a huge potential for publishers, because we think we have a user base that’s a really good target for audiobooks as well.”
Spotify’s total monthly active users jumped 19 percent to 381 million, with revenue of about 2.5 billion euros ($2.87 billion) in the latest quarter. According to research firm Omdia, the global audiobook market is expected to grow from $4 billion in 2020 to $9.3 billion by 2026.
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