Spotify's new Follow Along feature enhances audiobooks by integrating visuals and music, moving beyond traditional audio-only formats. The company is expanding its audiobook offerings, with 400,000 titles available and the launch of an Audiobooks+ add-on allowing additional hours of listening. This initiative follows years of focus on audiobooks and reflects Spotify's response to growing demand, despite recent financial losses. The feature is inspired by traditional supplementary content like PDFs, aiming to elevate the listener experience in a novel way.
When you consume a book, you're always making compromises. Print means no animation and no outbound links to enhance the reading experience. E-ink often yields potato-quality images.
Through its new Follow Along feature, Spotify is bringing bespoke visuals and music to the mix, nudging the form of the audiobook forward in the process.
Spotify launched an à la carte audiobook offering in 2022, then followed it with its Audiobooks in Premium program in 2023, granting premium subscribers 15 hours of books per month.
The Follow Along initiative spawned from the supplementary PDF files publishers provide with audiobooks, aiming to give listeners an enhanced experience with visuals.
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