Spotify adds narrated long-form magazine articles to its audiobook offering

The music streaming platform Spotify has expanded its content offering with a selection of magazine articles from different publications, which will be available with narration in your audiobook library.

Starting this Wednesday, in the United States you can access more than 650 magazine articles in Englishas the platform refers to from its website when mentioning that it has been produced by the internal Spotify Audiobooks team as “a selected collection that includes stories from publications such as Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, Vogue, Variety, Billboard, Vibe, GQ, WIRED, Vanity Fair and Pitchfork.”

In this way, expands the quality of Spotify Audiobooks contentwhich was originally released on September 20, 2022 to facilitate individual purchase of books in digital format. Later, in October 2023, it expanded by integrating an audiobook catalog at no additional cost for the Premium plan, and has now expanded with more than 650 narrated articles available.

Each of the articles narrated is less than two hours and is available within your monthly audiobook limit applied to users who pay for the Premium plan, which is 15 hours of audiobooks per month. This does not mean that users of the free version can purchase them individually, for 1.99 euros each.

Spotify endorses the launch of this new multimedia content experience as “the introduction of long-form journalism in audio format as a natural extension of music, podcasts and audiobooks why users already come to Spotify.

The objective of the platform is to offer all types of content that adapt to the users’ own needs “to help build healthy listening habits and ultimately increase interest in books over time,” said Spotify Audiobooks Licensing Director Colleen Prendergast.

At the moment, It is unknown when Spotify plans to expand this type of content to the rest of the regions. This new experience comes after updates dedicated to generative AI, which include the possibility of creating and saving personal podcasts created by AI agents from user documents, and guided playlists (Prompted Playlists), which allow them to be created from the introduction of a ‘prompt’.