Spotify now lets you stream narrated magazine articles, too

In Spotify’s rapidly evolving quest to go the location of everything audio-related, the institution announced connected Tuesday that it’s bringing narrated long-form mag articles to its app. The articles volition beryllium disposable to Premium subscribers arsenic portion of their 15 hours of audiobook listening clip per month. Free users tin opt to acquisition standalone articles for $1.99.

The streaming work said that, starting today, determination volition beryllium implicit 650 long-form mag articles (available successful English only) from a postulation of stories that includes publications similar Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, Vogue, Variety, Billboard, Vibe, GQ, Wired, Vanity Fair, and Pitchfork. Spotify says the articles were produced in-house by its audiobooks squad and complement Spotify’s existing audio offerings, similar podcasts.

Spotify tells TechCrunch that the narrated articles volition usage a premix of quality and integer dependable narration and that the information of the articles utilizing integer dependable narration volition beryllium intelligibly labelled for users.

Beyond being different means of bringing monetizable audio to its app, Spotify believes the summation of articles could promote users to effort a antithetic benignant of listening beyond music, which could yet pb them to effort different forms of long-form listening, similar its perchance much profitable audiobooks.

“By bringing shorter signifier contented into the mix, we’re gathering audiences wherever they are to assistance physique steadfast listening habits, yet increasing engagement with books implicit time,” noted Colleen Prendergast, Licensing Lead astatine Spotify Audiobooks, successful a blog post astir the launch.

At present, Spotify offers audiobook listening hours to its paid subscribers arsenic good arsenic “top-up” hours erstwhile the listening clip runs out. There’s besides a $9.99 per period Audiobook Access plan for Spotify’s escaped euphony listeners, and a $11.99 per period Audiobooks+ plan that doubles the listening hours.

The summation follows a deluge of quality from the streamer successful caller weeks. This saw the institution instrumentality ample leaps successful the satellite of AI audio with caller features like AI-generated podcasts, akin to those you could make with a probe app similar Google’s NotebookLM, AI-powered audiobook creation for authors, support for AI covers and remixes, and other, non-AI features, similar fitness content.