Spotify Premium Now Offers 15 Hours of Audiobook Streaming in Select Markets

Spotify now offers Premium subscribers in select markets 15 hours of audiobooks streaming every month. A catalog of 150,000 audobiooks will be available for subscribers in the UK and Australia today, with the US to follow later this year.

“Today we’re starting an entirely new chapter for our audiobooks offering by making more than 150,000 audiobooks available as part of Spotify Premium subscriptions. To start, we’re offering each Premium individual, as well as plan managers for Family and Duo accounts, 15 hours of listening per month—giving them the ability to enjoy as many titles as they want within that monthly allocation,” the company said yesterday.

Spotify started offering 300,000 audiobooks for purchase last year. However, because Spotify is a subscription-based service, it probably makes better sense to add a new audiobook perk to Spotify Premium to make the subscription more attractive.

For Spotify Premium members, audiobooks can be found via search and recommendations on the Home feed, and there’s also a dedicated audiobooks Hub with curated recommendations. When listening to audiobooks, Spotify will keep track of your progress and let you pick up where you left off on other devices, similar to how listening to podcasts works.

The current selection of 150,000 audiobooks includes “upwards of 70% of bestselling books,” the company said. Just like Spotify podcasts, audiobooks can also be downloaded for offline listening.

Back in July, Spotify raised the price of its Premium subscription in the US and other markets. Spotify Premium now costs $10.99/month (previously $9.99) in the US), and the Duo, Family, and Student subscriptions are also $1 more expensive now.

Adding 15 hours of audiobooks streaming every month will likely help to make the recent price increases easier to swallow, though Spotify still isn’t exactly competitive on audio quality. However, according to a previous report from Bloomberg, a “Supremium” plan with better audio quality could launch in non-US markets later this year.