When Bloomberg reported that Spotify would be upping the cost of its premium subscription from $9.99 to $10.99, and including 15 hours of audiobooks per month in the U.S., the change sounded like a win for songwriters and publishers. Higher subscription prices typically equate to a bump in U.S. mechanical royalties — but not this time.
By adding audiobooks into Spotify’s premium tier, the streaming service now claims it qualifies to pay a discounted “bundle” rate to songwriters for premium streams, given Spotify now has to pay licensing for both books and music from the same price tag — which will only be a dollar higher than when music was the only premium offering. Additionally, Spotify will reclassify its duo and family subscription plans as bundles as well.
15 hours of audiobooks per month is a joke. That’s not even one longer book.
And it’s not every member of the plan, it’s only the primary user. Also the “buy more hours” of an audiobook is such a crappy idea to get us to buy an audiobook, and gosh it’s not even all audiobooks it’s only the first of the series. Even if you add more hours, you can’t listen to the 2nd book. This is half the reason why they had to raise prices. It costs them a bit for those 15 hours and the music lovers and creators are paying the price for their misunderstanding
I didn’t think it could be worse… I just bought one Dell mini PC and I will turn it into server and I will start self host a lot of my services. Audiobookshelf is going to be one of them