Spotify announced that it has paid out “tens of millions” to audiobook publishers since allowing users to listen to 15 hours of audiobooks with its premium subscription package last fall.
Regarding this figure reported by an industry magazine, the company said, bookstoresaid it is “100% royalty” and expects royalty payments to “continue to increase” in the future. He did not give a more precise figure for what has been paid so far, but said the figure of “tens of millions” applied to both pounds and dollars.
However, the Society of Authors (SoA) said it “remains concerned that the terms of the contract are not clear.” “We are still determining the impact on authors’ incomes and whether this is actual additional sales or simply taking market share away from Amazon,” the industry group said.
A recently leaked audio recording of an internal meeting at Audible (owned by Amazon) shows an employee asking CEO Bob Carrigan why the company is “afraid” of its competition. “It’s hard to ignore what Spotify is doing,” Carrigan said. This comes weeks after Audible announced it would lay off 5% of its workforce. In December, Spotify also announced layoff plans affecting 17% of its workforce.
Spotify said audiobook rights holders will be paid “based on which titles are listened to and for how long.” The company declined to comment further on its compensation model. “Each of our book publishing partners has licensing negotiations with Spotify, and they tell us that our payment model is competitive with other audiobook products.”
Spotify said it is seeing “exponential growth in sales” of audiobooks. For example, Briana Wiest’s The Mountain Is You has seen “sales increase by nearly 3,000%” since it was added to Premium Hers catalog. However, SoA said it was not surprised to see such numbers as “the premium catalog is free” for those who already have a Spotify premium account.
“The real question is the impact on overall audiobook sales and downloads, and the material impact on authors’ pockets. We probably won’t know until the royalties report comes out.”
The SoA urges “all authors to ask questions of their publishers,” and Spotify’s revenue in particular “allows authors to weigh the impact and ensure these downloads are being made correctly.” We request that this be separately stated in the copyright royalty statement so that we can do so.” It is accounted for as a license rather than a sale. ”
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Publishers Faber & Faber and Profile Books said they had no comment at this time. Penguin Random House, Hachette, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan did not respond to requests for comment.
