Spotify is doing well and helping publishers in the process—or so says the latest release from, er, Spotify. Despite the obvious possible messiah complex going on, there are some really interesting and encouraging figures in the report. The catalog of English-language audiobooks now exceeds 400,000, which shows the scale of the operation.
ALLi News Editor Dan Holloway
The most impressive are the growth figures: “the number of audiobook listeners and listening hours increased by more than 30% and 35% year-over-year, respectively, in the U.S., U.K., and Australia.”
Those are huge numbers in isolation. But the fact that listening hours are increasing even faster than new listeners is more encouraging, as it implies that people are listening more than they did.
What Do Readers Want?
And speaking of loyal followers, a heads-up that one of my favorite regular reads, Publishing Perspectives, has a survey out asking what people want to read more of from them. Aside from the obvious “more Porter Anderson, please,” do go over and have your say.
AI Summaries Threaten Publisher Traffic
We do have some AI news to finish off with. A Wall Street Journal report has confirmed what many of us probably already knew: AI-generated searches reduce click-throughs to published content. This has been the fear for a long time—and not just in relation to AI.
The European Union’s controversial “link tax,” many years in the making, was designed to stem the leaking of income content producers would face from aggregation searches and sites that gave increasingly detailed summaries of the sites to which they were linking.
What this report finds is that AI summaries of search results really are affecting traffic to the sites they are summarizing.
This, of course, illustrates the problem AI companies and rights holders face. Without income flowing to rights holders, the AI companies will have no high-quality material on which to base the results that take the income away from rights holders. It’s a situation that potentially has a lot of losers.
Additional coverage is available via Publishers Weekly.
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