This week's second story is less legally dense and full of plot twists than our first. But no less important. At the center of it is ElevenLabs, the AI-generated voice giant. You will recall that ElevenLabs was in the news last week because of its audiobook partnership with Spotify. This week, a reminder that ElevenLabs is, itself, an audiobook platform thanks to its Eleven Reader app.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
Eleven Reader has two offerings for readers: ten hours a month for free, or an all-you-can-eat “Ultra” package (creators currently get paid in a very on-brand way: $1.10 for eleven minutes or more of listening).
The Penguin Random House Deal
The latest announcement from ElevenLabs is the addition of 200,000 human-narrated titles, largely thanks to a deal with Penguin Random House.
There are two things I found particularly interesting in this story. First is the obvious one that the move to position Eleven Reader as a listening destination for audiobooks comes at pretty much the same time as the deal with the big competitor in that space, Spotify. Which means more routes to listeners for those wanting to maximize their reach (though the perennial question is whether that's simply reslicing the same pie rather than adding new market size).
Swapping Human Narrators for AI
Second is a detail buried away in the coverage, explaining the significance of the fact that for some titles, readers can trade in the human narrator for one of ElevenLabs' myriad artificial voices (what isn't clear is whether the human narrator still gets royalties in these cases). Apparently the company's own information tells them that 74 percent of listeners stop listening to an audiobook because they don't like the narrator. And it would seem their answer to this problem is to let people change narrators to one they find more engaging.
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