Authors Express Concerns Over Spotify’s Entry into Audiobooks, Fearing Financial Loss
US authors are expressing concerns about Spotify Technology SA’s entry into the audiobook market, fearing that they will not receive fair compensation from the streaming platform. In October, Spotify started providing free audiobooks to its millions of subscribers as part of their monthly plans. While all of the major publishers, including Penguin Random House LLC, have joined the initiative and expressed enthusiasm, some authors are apprehensive about the potential financial implications.
But not everyone in the book industry is thrilled, including Bradley Tusk, a New York-based venture capitalist, author and bookstore owner whose political advocacy firm Tusk Strategies brings together authors who worry that the move to streaming will make it even harder to make money. living.
“I’ve seen this movie enough times,” Tusk said in an interview. “If we can say and do something about it at the beginning of the cycle, we can solve it before it becomes an unfathomable problem. That’s what we’re trying to do.”
(Tusk also managed Bloomberg LP owner Michael Bloomberg’s 2009 mayoral campaign.)
“While we cannot access the current details of the deal, both book publishers are negotiating licenses with Spotify and tell us that our payment model is consistently competitive with other audiobook offerings,” a Spotify spokesperson said in a statement. “Publishers have expressed satisfaction with the results they’re seeing since introducing audiobooks to Spotify, providing added value to their creators.”
A new group organized by Tusk, the Coalition of Concerned Creators, demands more transparency from Spotify, especially about how creators are paid. To kick off the campaign, writer Kim Scott published an opinion column in the New York Times on December 13, titled Remember What Spotify Did to the Music Industry? The books are next.
In the piece, he warned that on Spotify, authors usually only get paid if people listen to their entire book – rather than receiving a full royalty for each partial listen, as is common with other audiobook services.
Many of Spotify’s subscribers are under the age of 35, he added, a demographic that comprises the largest number of audiobook consumers. By giving them 15 hours of free listening per month, “some members of this group will switch from paying for audiobooks to listening to some of those audiobooks as part of their current Spotify subscription.”
The bottom line, he suggested, is less money for writers.
Publishers have so far not responded to the column or revealed many details about the structure of the audiobook reimbursement, so broader claims about the streaming service’s impact on the book industry are difficult to assess.
Details of one deal have been obtained by Bloomberg News. In a note to authors, Macmillan Publishers Inc. wrote that authors receive full royalty credit for each unit listened to, as long as they collectively achieve a total listening experience for their work. For example, Macmillan explained that if an audiobook is 100 minutes long, a full listen can be achieved with either one Spotify subscriber listening for 100 minutes, or five customers listening for 20 minutes each.
According to Macmillan’s terms, new listening minutes for each title are calculated each month to determine the total number of units consumed, and the resulting payment is calculated using a discount from the digital list price.
Macmillan declined to comment.
Not all of Spotify’s book publishers use the same compensation model, according to a person with knowledge of the deals.
Hardly’s opposition to Spotify follows similar requests from a British organization, the Society of Authors, which issued a statement in October demanding more information about arrangements with publishers.
“Audiobook streaming competes directly with sales and is even more harmful than music streaming, as books are usually read only once, while music is often streamed many times,” they wrote.
