The Next Chapter of Spotifys Audiobooks Speaks Volumes About Where the Streamer Is Heading

Spotify announced Wednesday (Oct. 7) that it’s expanding its audiobook service to virtually all of its 750 million monthly active users across 180 countries by the end of 2026, as the Swedish streaming giant bets that a subset of subscribers are willing to nearly double their monthly Spotify bill to hear books.

Spotify began offering audiobooks to premium individual subscribers in the U.S. and U.K. three years ago, later expanding the offering to 22 markets. Adoption grew fast, with listening hours increasing 60% from 2024 to 2025, the company said at its investor presentation in May. In mid-2025, Spotify launched Audiobooks+, an additional $11.99 per month subscription plan for premium subscribers —who pay $12.99 — who want to double the allotment of audiobook listening time they get from 15 to 30 hours per month.

“We’re building products that help people discover new books, that give them more chances to enjoy them, and that weave stories into every single part of their day, because nobody ever regrets time spent with a good book,” Smith said during a press briefing the company held on Monday (Oct. 5).

Spotify says it now has more than 1 million premium subscribers paying for Audiobooks+, and annual recurring revenue from Audiobooks+ was estimated to be $100 million as of July. Expanding the program to more markets with more books in additional languages will attract new audiences, particularly younger readers, with roughly half of audiobook listeners skewing younger than 35, Spotify executives say.

“These are very valuable users,” Alex Norström, Spotify co-CEO, said at the company’s investor day in May, adding that some Audiobooks+ subscribers are paying for blocks of more streaming time above the 30 hours they get per month hours. “These subscribers have lifetime values that are multiples of premium-only users. They spend far more and they stay much longer.”

In addition to streaming books, Spotify launched a partnership with Bookshop.org that allows subscribers to buy books in print, and its Page Match feature lets subscribers switch to Spotify to listen to a book from the exact page in the physical book where they stopped reading. Spotify claims that Page Match users finish books twice as fast, and that two-thirds of those users are under the age of 35, a segment the publishing industry has been keen to reach.

Page Match has “quickly become one of our most consistently used and highest performing product launches,” Owen Smith, Spotify’s global head of books, said at the May investor day. “We are creating healthy reading habits and high-value behavior that becomes even more powerful when it sits inside the broader Spotify ecosystem.”

The company also shares data about audiobook consumption and marketing information with authors and publishers through Spotify for Authors. It has also invested in Spotify Audiobooks Selects, which gives independent authors the tools to make professional-grade audiobooks and offers an additional AI voice-over tool that uses ElevenLabs’ technology.