On this episode of the Self-Publishing with ALLi podcast, Dan Holloway reports on Spotify’s continued expansion into audiobooks, including new access across key Nordic markets and the rollout of its AI-powered “recaps” feature that helps listeners pick up where they left off. He outlines how Spotify is addressing copyright concerns around AI use and notes broader audio developments, including 11 Labs signing voice deals with major celebrities. Dan also looks at beehiiv’s move to position itself as a full-service platform for long-form creators, offering new website and analytics tools for authors who rely on newsletters.
Listen to the Podcast: Spotify Expands Audiobooks
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About the Host
Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet, and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines, He competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle.
Read the Transcript
Dan Holloway: Hello, and welcome to another week of self-publishing news from a very, very chilly Oxford, where winter has thoroughly taken hold, and when it's the midst of winter, what better way to warm yourself than sitting in front of the fire with a good audiobook?
Spotify Expands Audiobook Market
It is audiobooks where we start, and we start with Spotify.
Spotify continue to expand their audiobook offering. First of all, we have the news that they are expanding in Europe. So, they have opened their audiobook access, they claim, in five more European markets. So, more and more opportunity for your books to reach more audiences through Spotify.
At the center of this new offering is a whole host of Nordic markets, that's Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and Iceland. Of course, this is significant because this is historically what I guess we think of as the home of the audiobook. Many of the world's leading audiobook companies, including of course, Spotify, now are based in the Nordic countries. So, we know there are huge markets there, and now you can start to reach those huge markets through Spotify.
Spotify's New AI Recaps Feature
Also, in Spotify news, and this is the really big piece of news that we had from them over the last week or so, is that they have introduced a new feature, and this is called recaps.
Recaps is exactly what you would imagine it is, a feature which enables you to catch up when you have already read or listened to a bit of your book. That was on the morning commute, then you get back on the bus, and you might want to refresh yourself of where you are. If you have read more than 15 or 20 minutes of the book, this is a beta feature, but for those to whom it applies, a little button will appear that you can press, which will give you a recap of the story so far.
This is, of course, very similar to a feature that Amazon launched last year, I believe it was coinciding with the launch of the Kindle Color Scribe. They launched an AI tool for Kindle recaps, which would do exactly the same; you could get a ‘story so far', basically so that you could remember where it was you were and immerse yourself straight back into the reading experience.
That's the same principle at operation here. It's something that we are very used to from television, of course. Whenever you have a serial, you expect a ‘coming next’ type feature. I don't think any audiobook or eBook company yet has a ‘coming next’ feature. But when you do come back at the start of the next episode, you tend to have a story so far, you can skip it, and this is sort of the functionality here. You don't have to use it, but you can.
The idea, I think is to make reading a more seamless experience and to make people not worried about going back and listening to a book that they might have forgotten a bit about. So, I think the principle is to make it less likely that people will give up on books.
It is an AI feature, of course, and what this means is that the AI will recap the story for you. Spotify though is very, very mindful of the fact that this might be controversial. It might not be something that authors are necessarily altogether comfortable with. In particular, they are very mindful of the fact that people who are skeptical about AI are very, very skeptical about what the parameters of that AI are, and in particular, whether external AI's will be used, whether generative AI's will be trained, and whether people's copyright will be infringed.
Spotify is very keen to answer this. It has learned its lesson from times when it hasn't always explained this fully, and authors and musicians have been very quick to spread stories that may or may not be true about the extent of AI.
So, I will read from the Spotify press announcement. They state, ‘Recaps use AI technology to help you catch up, but the work of authors and narrators stays protected. We are not using audiobook content for LLM training purposes, or voice generation and Recaps do not replicate narration or replace the original audiobook in any way.'
So, very keen to fend off any accusations of overreach or copyright theft from either authors or voice artists.
It's good to see that they are still doing that and they are still covering those kinds of issues upfront. That is Spotify.
ElevenLabs Begin Celebrity Voice Deals
While we're on the subject of narration, it's worth mentioning ElevenLabs, who are the AI-generated voice, major players. They have started making deals with celebrities.
AI voice generation and celebrities is a very hot topic. Scarlett Johansen, of course, got very, very cross when OpenAI seemed to have a voice that was very, very similar to hers, and there was a lawsuit involved.
Now some celebrities, and Michael Caine is amongst these, so that's very interesting, because obviously it's someone with a really, really distinctive voice, they're starting to sign some deals. How far that goes remains to be seen.
What else do I have for you that's not audio related?
Beehiiv's New Tools for Authors
About as text related as you can get – newsletters.
A couple of weeks ago I signed up with beehive and coincidentally, it seems beehiiv are now going all in on tools and the aim of their tools, they do say they're AI tools, but not generative AI. I think their aim is to make themselves a one stop shop for people who are authors of long form content.
So, they want to have a website as well as a newsletter, and to make that website really slick and to have lots of analytic tools and enable various types of segmentation and monetizing for people who are interested in making their newsletter the absolute center of either their written career or their marketing work around their writing.
At some point, I dare say, I'll have a look at those and see if there of any interest to me.
But for those of you who have an email list and who have a newsletter, it's an interesting development.
SEO for Authors in the Age of AI
With interesting developments, I will go and see if there is any interesting development on the heat being generated by my heater because I can actually feel my lips starting to seize up as I speak in the cold.
So, I look forward very much to speaking to you at the same time next week. I may have a deep dive then on some really, really interesting stuff that Mark Williams has been saying about search engine optimization in the age of AI. I will send the link to Howard so you can have a look at that in advance.
It's not necessarily something that is news relevant enough to spend too much time talking about here, but it's very, very much worth a look because he has some very interesting thoughts on how that might actually work well for authors in the age of AI with search being a slightly more organic thing, so do go and check that out.
As I say, I will speak to you again at the same time next week.
