Spotify is excited. And it clearly thinks we should be excited, too. The company has been around for seventeen years (I am sure I have mentioned this before, but if you have even a passing interest in Spotify, the relationship between tech and the arts, or just cracking good television, you should check out the Netflix series The Playlist, which tells the story of Spotify’s early years using some clever narrative devices). And 2024 was its first full year of profitability.
ALLi News Editor, Dan Holloway
Spotify for Authors Announced
The key figures are these: 675 million monthly active users (up 12 percent year over year), 263 million subscribers (up 11 percent), driving a 16 percent revenue increase to 4.2 billion euros, with an operating income of 477 million euros.
These figures are at the top of a bright but concise infographic that Spotify has created to report its results to the outside world. And it’s that infographic that is really interesting for us as authors.
The third mini section of the poster is titled “Connecting Fans, Creators, and Art in New Ways.” Front and center (or at least just above the announcement of cover art for playlists) is the proud announcement, “Launching Spotify for Authors,” which trumpets an audiobook catalog of more than 350,000 titles.
It is also very clearly aimed at indies: “Our platform empowers authors and publishers with better tools…” Spotify wants to deal directly with authors.
Romantasy’s Continued Rise
And as a little “and finally,” I reported recently on US book sale trends from last year and the importance of romantasy as a genre driving sales. The latest figures show a similar situation in the UK. There was, it seems, a 41.3 percent growth in science fiction and fantasy sales, driven by the subgenre—and, of course, the latest force in literary global domination, Rebecca Yarros. It seems that the prevailing narrative is that BookTok is a direct contributing factor.
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