Spotify announced on Friday that it plans to speculate €1 million — or roughly $1.1 million — to spice up audiobook manufacturing in languages aside from English, starting with French and Dutch.
The funding signifies that Spotify is keen for extra non-English titles in its restricted library because it tries to compete with main gamers like Audible within the $8.7 billion global audiobooks market.
Adoption has been notably sluggish in France and the Netherlands, which is why Spotify is beginning with these languages.
In line with the corporate, lower than 3% of French-language books are at the moment accessible in audio format, with solely 20,000 audiobooks in France in comparison with about 750,000 bodily titles. Within the Netherlands, round 15,000 Dutch audiobooks can be found out of a bodily library of 209,000 titles.
The corporate launched its audiobook service in France and the Benelux area this previous October.
Spotify believes the sluggish adoption can probably be attributed to excessive manufacturing prices, which can deter publishers from changing their written works into audio codecs.
Regardless of the corporate emphasizing its dedication to working with human narrators, Spotify just lately partnered with ElevenLabs as a cheap answer to encourage authors to publish AI-narrated content material. Nevertheless, the usage of AI narration has raised issues inside the publishing neighborhood.