Events Calendar

US Audiobook Sales Grow

News Summary: US Audiobook Sales Grow 9% to $2.43 Billion; Active Titles Up 43% as Revenue per Title Falls

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.
Read more
ElevenLabs Adds 200,000 Human-Narrated Titles

News Summary: ElevenLabs Adds 200,000 Human-Narrated Titles; Readers Can Swap Narrators for AI Voices

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.
Read more
Spotify Reports 60% Audiobook Listening Growth

News Summary: Spotify Reports 60% Audiobook Listening Growth; Page Match Feature Drives Engagement

One reason Spotify has been in the news a fair bit of late is that May 21 was its Investor Day. That's the time each year when they make big announcements about the year ahead, such as reported in my earlier post on the ElevenLabs deal. And it's when they look back and highlight the things they are proudest of in the previous year. And that's what I'm looking at today.
Read more
Spotify Launches ElevenLabs-Powered Audiobook Creation Tool

News Summary: Spotify Launches ElevenLabs-Powered Audiobook Creation Tool; Voice Actors Sue AI Companies

Spotify joined up with the AI voice generation platform ElevenLabs last year to allow rights holders who created audiobooks using ElevenLabs to upload those books to Spotify. They have just announced they will be taking this collaboration a step further in a feature that in June will be launched as an invitation-only beta. I'll quote the key sentence from the Investor Day statement on this: "Built directly into Spotify for Authors, and powered by ElevenLabs' digital voice technology, authors can now access seamless audiobook generation and publishing without exclusive contracts."
Read more
OpenAI Shuts Down Sora

News Summary: OpenAI Shuts Down Sora Video Platform; Audible Partners with British Airways

I think I reported on the Sora app when it launched back in October. The app, which enables users to access OpenAI's Sora generative AI platform on their phones to create short video clips, hit the headlines back then for two reasons. In one of the starkest "there's good news and bad news" stories yet to come out of AI, the good news (for OpenAI anyway) was that the launch broke all kinds of records, reaching one million downloads in just five days. That's faster than ChatGPT. In "on the other hand" news, it kind of sucked that people started swamping social media with fake video clips of dead people, like the beloved Robin Williams. And of course, even at the launch the copyright radar was working overtime.
Read more
Audible Launches Cheaper Standard Plan

News Summary: Audible Launches Cheaper Standard Plan to Challenge Spotify’s Audiobook Growth

The recent run of new offerings from audiobook platforms keeps on going. It's reached the stage where even TechCrunch (who are, as the name suggests, more a tech than a publishing outlet) are openly calling this an open battle for market share between Audible and Spotify. And are suggesting that Spotify's remarkable growth in the short time (four years) since they launched their audiobook offering has got Audible flustered.
Read more
Audio Social Network

Self-Publishing News: Spotify is Slowly Building an Audio Social Network to Connect Creators and Listeners

Is Spotify building an Audio Social Network? It’s interesting that Spotify has nudged its way back into the news of late with a couple of moves relevant to writers. First, there was the decoupling of audiobooks from its music streaming by allowing listeners to select between a premium service that included fifteen hours of audiobooks and a dollar-cheaper basic service that didn’t. Now they are supporting comments on podcasts, and TechCrunch has a fascinating article suggesting that may get rolled out across all audio.
Read more
Older Posts →
Back To Top
×Close search
Search
Loading...