Spotify has expanded its support for AI-narrated audiobooks. Photo Credit: Joyce Busola
Still plowing ahead with an aggressive spoken-word buildout, Spotify has expanded its support for audiobooks narrated by artificial intelligence.
The diversification-minded platform disclosed this enhanced support in a brief release, about three months after equipping certain audiobooks with video content.
As most know, these maneuvers arrived against the backdrop of a highly controversial bundling strategy for Spotify. Thanks to said strategy, the service is reaping massive compositional royalty savings in the U.S.
Unsurprisingly, the situation isn’t sitting right with songwriters and publishers, to put it mildly. And the MLC, despite facing a dismissal setback, remains adamant that Spotify’s music-audiobook packages aren’t bundles at all.
In other words, there are multiple reasons for Spotify to bolster its audiobook offerings. Enter the aforementioned AI-narration support, resulting specifically from a deal with London-headquartered ElevenLabs.
Though Spotify has hosted AI-voiced audiobooks for some time – among different things, the company’s multifaceted buildout means individual feature additions are difficult to track – it’s just now accepting uploads from ElevenLabs.
Authors (and non-authors looking to make a buck) can use the three-year-old “AI Audio research and deployment company” to narrate their works in as many as 29 languages. From there, the relevant creators have the option of tapping Findaway Voices to distribute the outputs, which will be labeled as AI-narrated, to Spotify and elsewhere.
Keeping the focus on the writing side for a moment, Spotify is touting the move as a means of “lowering the barrier to entry so more authors than ever can have their books heard.”
But like with the increasingly common claim that generative AI is “democratizing” music creation, the outwardly positive objective buckles under closer scrutiny. “Authors” unwilling to pay a narrator (a minor cost in light of the effort required to write a proper book) or self-narrate probably shouldn’t release audiobooks.
Thus, it may not be long before Spotify’s audiobook library, as with its music and podcast counterparts, is badly inundated with far-from-stellar listening options.
In any event, the step might help connect undiscerning Spotify users with audiobooks in the long term – adding weight to the “bundle” in the process. Whether they know it or not, most U.S. subscribers can access 15 total hours of audiobooks per month.
Worth noting in conclusion are the bigger-picture consequences (including on the music side) of Spotify’s AI partnerships. While ElevenLabs specializes mainly in voice-related services, several relatively new hires are working on music features, their LinkedIn profiles show.