Spotify has launched a new standalone subscription service in the US for people who only want to listen to audiobooks, the aptly named Audiobooks Access Tier.
For $9.99 a month, you'll get 15 hours of listening to Spotify's catalog of over 200,000 audiobooks. These include notable series such as A song of ice and fire from George RR Martin to independent titles like The Khan By Saima Mir. According to the announcement, you can still listen to music and podcasts. However, they will maintain business interruptions. Those ads are not going away. To get rid of them, you'll need to purchase a separate Spotify Premium plan for $11 per month.
Pay for a subscription
What's interesting about the level is that it doesn't look like you can sign up for the Spotify app on mobile or desktop. We checked both and it wasn't in either. Instead, you'll have to go to a separate audiobook page on the company's website. If you scroll down to about halfway you will find the subscribe button. By the way, there is no free trial period. Once you purchase the plan, you're on it until you cancel.
It's a little strange not to have a more direct way to subscribe in the app, although Spotify says it's for good reason. A company representative told us that doing it this way allows them to avoid passing on App Store fees to users. If you don't know, Spotify stopped supporting App Store subscriptions in 2016. They even removed legacy subscribers last year.
It seems that if the platform had allowed iOS users to purchase directly in the app, they would have had to force people to pay the Apple tax. And to make it fair for everyone, Android owners have to go through the same process, at least that's how we understand it. In our opinion, his explanation leaves out many important details.
Missing details
As you can guess, we have several questions like, is there a way to increase listening hours? 15 hours may be fine for the casual listener, but may be too short for the advanced user. The Premium plan offers a way to add an additional 10 hours of listening time for $9.99, however this is not available on the Audiobook Access tier.
Of course, the elephant in the room here is that we still don't have Spotify Supremium, which is supposed to offer lossless audio streaming. There were some rumors hinting at an imminent release in September 2023, but now we're in March 2024 and people are still waiting.
Therefore, we contacted the platform to request more details and ask if they have plans to implement the audiobook access level in other countries. This story will be updated later.
You can't listen to audiobooks without a good pair of headphones. For recommendations, check out TechRadar's list of the best headphones for 2024.
