I wrote recently about the 60 percent growth in audiobook listening reported by Spotify in 2025. This week we have figures on the whole of the audiobook market (in the US at least), which help to contextualize that growth. The figures come as the Audio Publishers Association announces the findings of its two annual surveys: hard data on sales from Toluna, and a comprehensive survey on listening habits from Edison Research.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
The headline figure is that audiobook sales in the US grew in 2025 by 9 percent to $2.43 billion. That's impressive growth, though the fact that we're talking about it as impressive growth shows in itself that the heady days of a decade straight of double-digit growth are now behind us (unless you're Spotify, apparently). This comes in the same week that the Publishers Association in the UK released its own figures, which you can check out in this nifty infographic. But the key item there is that audiobook growth was a very similar 10%, and the total £255 million in audiobook sales accounted for 10 percent of the total domestic consumer market.
The AI Narration Question
Equally interesting is another of the headline figures: the 43 percent increase in “active titles” (to 750,000) between 2024 and 2025. It would seem that a large proportion of this growth can be explained by the increasing ease of use of AI tools for voice narration, meaning a larger percentage of titles now find their way into the format (which was, if you recall, the very first case that the generative voice industry made for its adoption), but the figures officially show that only 0.03 percent of sales were for AI-narrated books. I have to say I find that hard to believe.
But what really strikes about these two figures taken together is the unavoidable truth (though one that will hide many exceptions and nuances of course): if the number of available titles grows at a faster pace than sales, then revenue per title is diminishing.
YouTube Listening Raises Rights Concerns
A further note of caution came with the finding that people are increasingly listening (45 percent of listeners reported doing so, up from 35 percent) to audiobooks on YouTube, many of which have dubious connections to the original rights holders.
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